Article

Cybersecurity Basics

July 26, 2016

Excerpt: Cybersecurity is a hot topic these days, but what does it mean to practicing lawyers today? Essentially, cybersecurity is the protection of your information systems from theft or damage. For an attorney, that means making sure your client’s information stays confidential. Today, that includes taking steps to protect yourself from experiencing a data breach.

Are lawyers doing enough to safeguard law firm and client information? Our opinion is that many are not. Here are a few reasons we hold that opinion.

  • The FBI reported at a legal technology conference in 2013 that they are seeing hundreds of law firms being increasingly targeted by hackers.
  • Mandiant, now part of InfoSec giant FireEye, reported that 7% of the breaches it investigated in 2014 involved law firms.
  • Another report noted that 80% of the largest 100 law firms, by revenue, had been hacked between 2011 and 2015.
  • At a meeting of large firm information security experts from D.C., most admitted that they had been breached – and that they were aware from their colleagues that others had been breached as well.
  • Even with the dismal record of reporting law firm data breaches, we still learn of them in the press and informally – and we will detail some of them for you.

Read the entire article here.