Progress Software Fights to Keep MOVEit Hack Cases in Boston

Litigation over the big wave of MOVEit hack cases is now taking shape in Boston.

Progress Software, the Burlington, Massachusetts-based parent of the company that provides the MOVEit system, told U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs in a recent filing that it wants her to keep as many parties as possible in Boston.

In October, the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation put pretrial proceedings for all of the MOVEit cases under Burroughs. AMC Theatres has asked Burroughs to let two suits against it involving employee information affected by the hack stay in the courts in Kansas, near its headquarters.

Progress acknowledges that the AMC workers may have named AMC, not Progress Software, as the defendant. But the multidistrict litigation panel “has made clear that such circumstance does not defeat centralization,” Progress says. “The panel has already ruled that ‘the MOVEit vulnerability is at the core of all cases’ such that it would be ‘impossible’ to ‘disentangle the allegations against Progress … from the allegations against other defendants.”

The hack: Many organizations, including life insurers, use MOVEit to transfer big, sensitive data files.

Cl0p, a ransomware group, got into MOVEit servers sometime around May 2023.

The hack affected about 26 million client accounts at U.S. pension plans and U.S. life and annuity issuers.