The biggest potential threat to any law firm is hackers and cyber criminals. These hackers want into your system with no other purpose than to cause havoc. If given the opportunity these hackers will take advantage of it. The opportunity given to them can be microscopic, but they will turn this into macroscopic damage.
When doing Work From Home you obviously have much less supervision and with that can cause legal staff and attorneys to become more laxed and lenient in their focus and adherence to cybersecurity best practices. It's the legal professional's responsibility to maintain appropriate levels of professional integrity but without realizing it you can inadvertently lower it in a WFH, non-office environment.
When the world is in fear, it’s the easiest time for criminals to achieve their goals of harm. The same thing goes for cyber-criminals. With all the focus on this pandemic, it creates an open door for any hacker to slip through. We expect an increase in cyber attacks because of all the staff working from home.
Your staff's home network security jeopardize your firms network security…
Uneducated on cybersecurity, legal staff may not protect their home Wi-Fi adequately can give drive by hackers a straight path to your firm’s documents and databases.
Your Law Firm, is under attack! Right now, extremely dangerous and well-funded cybercrime rings in China, Russia and the Ukraine are using sophisticated software systems to hack into thousands of law firms like yours to steal confidential client data and credit cards, and swindle money directly out of your IOLTA account.
Let me guess:
"Our IT guy has us covered" or "we trust them to take care of that for us".
How can you tell if your IT guy is putting your law license, reputation, money and staff at risk? If you always just "trust" them, you'll never know until it's too late and then you've lost $10,000-$20,000 in repair bills (to the IT guy no less), dozens of customers, respect of your colleagues (except the ones that took your clients) and hundreds of billable hours.
In a continuous effort to protect customers, Microsoft Partners in the US just received notice to meet Microsoft security requirements on August 1, 2019 or else.
The new security requirement is aimed at a very specific partner segment in which SpliceNet transacts: Cloud Solution Providers or “CSP”. As a CSP, we provide companies and law firms Microsoft Office 365, Dynamics 365, Azure subscriptions and other related Microsoft subscription services including Security products.
So yet again, I bring you another scam. This time I bring you a unique eCommerce scam. Here’s the run down, this person was attempting to purchase a car off the popular app OfferUp. The seller mentioned that this car had been highly sought after recently and wanted a fee to hold the car for them.
Although most who watch this would never fall for this scam but many of our elderly and young Americans would. Warn your loved ones that criminal fraudsters can impersonate anyone’s (my mother-in-law in this case) Facebook account and get them to fall for costly tricks.
To explain your security hole I'll use an analogy:
A typical law firm’s cyber threat protection is like home security:
Most homes have a solid front door with a locking handle, deadbolt and peep hole (your network Firewall)
Most homes have blinds or curtains in your windows and typical window locks that flip to lock (your computer Antivirus)
If your home has a sliding glass door for your patio or balcony you might have a “bar” to ensure if the lock is shimmied bad guys can’t slide the door open (Spam filtering software)
And finally on your garage door, there’s a lock that is probably not set because the garage door opener holds the door shut.