6 Step Ransomware Defense Plan for Law Firms
Whether you’ve been listening to a colleague extoll the difficulties of Bitcoin transactions or you’ve fallen victim to an attack yourself, you’re likely well aware that ransomware attacks are no longer just a problem for ‘other businesses’. Law firms are directly in the crosshairs of cyber criminals for one simple reason – they make for a great target.
Disasters can strike unexpectedly, so it’s crucial for firm employees to be aware of potential risks and know how to respond. Here are some key threats to protect against:
Losing data or access to it can halt a firm’s operations. Disclosing confidential client data can lead to malpractice actions and potentially shut down a firm. Common causes include:
It’s hard to believe Wi-Fi has existed for over 20 years. We all learned the value of reliable in-home internet over the last couple of years. Perhaps you found that what satisfied the “Netflix need” didn’t satisfy work-from-home. Two new technologies are here to make home Wi-Fi better.
Home offices and remote work made huge leaps in recent years. Prior to 2020, an office’s “power situation” was not usually the lawyer’s concern and working from home was rarely “make or break.” Times have changed and a quality remote and home office setup are critical. You can no longer rely on IT staff or maintenance personnel to handle fundamental tech issues.
All data storage systems will eventually fail. This includes the spinning hard drives in your servers or desktop computers, the solid state drives (SSD's) in your laptop computers, and the flash memory modules in your tablets and smart phones. The question isn't "if" but "when" will you have a data storage failure.
Any hardware or software you have onsite is at risk of crashes, power and Internet interruptions, natural disasters, sabotage, and theft. Whether you rent a software application (like a case management program) or you rent server access (aka hosted servers), the computers you’re accessing are in data centers with Fort Knox security, redundant/backup power, redundant Internet access, and fault tolerance few law firms in the world could afford to build in-house. A Tier IV (highest) rated data center guarantees 99.995% uptime.
Computer hard drives fail. The machine may be running a mechanical hard drive with spinning plates if you have a desktop computer, an external backup drive, or an older laptop. Newer laptops, smartphones, and tablets have “solid-state” hard drives where data is written to and read from computer chips. Solid-state hard drives have no moving parts, hence the name.
Here are some tools and techniques to keep your client data safe.
For purposes of this discussion, encryption can be defined as follows.
“Encryption is the process of converting data to an unrecognizable or ‘encrypted’ form. It is commonly used to protect sensitive information so that only authorized parties can view it. This includes files and storage devices, as well as data transferred over wireless networks and the Internet.
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By Barron K. Henley, Esq. and Jeffrey Schoenberger, Esq.
Backup is not an area to cut corners on costs, but there are ways to protect yourself and not spend extravagantly.
We recommend that your primary backup is internet-based, constantly running as a background process on your machines. However, we do NOT recommend relying solely on an Internet backup option. Have a secondary backup system on-site (either external hard drive(s) or network-attached storage (see below)) Here are a few suggestions:
Commonly, users think they have computer protection software running when they really lack it, or it is outdated. While both Windows and macOS have good defenses active out of the box these days, a nice change from prior versions, threats grow unabated.
