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Telephone: 703.359.0700

Sensei Article Featured in San Bernardino Country Bar Bulletin

April 2, 2020

“The Intersection of Ethics and Well-Being” by Sharon Nelson and John Simek was featured in the March 2020 of the San Bernardino County Bar Bulletin.

Excerpt:

ABA RESOLUTION 105

The ABA House of Delegates adopted Resolution 105 at the 2018 ABA Midyear Meeting. The resolution supports the goal of reducing mental health and substance use disorders and improving the well-being of lawyers, judges and law students. It urges stakeholders within the legal profession to consider the recommendations set out in The Path to Lawyer Well-Being: Practical Recommendations for Positive Change. The pursuit of lawyer wellness has spread rapidly through law firms, bar associations, state bars and state supreme courts.

The authors have monitored many of these developments – and now teach several CLEs related to lawyer wellness. We applaud the actions taken to date – and there is still so much to be done. We decided to write an article that highlights some of the developments since Resolution 105 was adopted, including several sad stories that have shaken the legal profession.

Read the entire article here. (page10)

Sensei Officers Featured in Attorney at Work

April 1, 2020

Sensei’s Sharon Nelson and John Simek’s article “Getting Started With Zoom – and Using It Securely: Some Advice” was recently featured in Attorney at Work’s Videoconferencing: Tech Tips.

Excerpt:

The coronavirus pandemic has forced a lot of lawyers to use videoconferencing to “meet” with co-workers and clients. One of the more popular videoconferencing platforms is Zoom. Indeed, we see Zoom being used the most, especially among solo and small firm lawyers. While we can’t cover all the options and settings for Zoom, here is some advice on the best way to use and secure Zoom for your firm.

Zoom Basics

The first question is, what the heck is this thing called Zoom? According to the website, “Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, collaboration, chat, and webinars across mobile devices, desktops, telephones, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution used around the world in board, conference, huddle, and training rooms, as well as executive offices and classrooms.”

Zoom is extremely easy to use and is available across multiple platforms and operating systems. It has apps for Android and iOS so you can use it on your mobile device. And there are desktop clients for macOS, Windows and a bunch of Linux/Unix versions (like Ubuntu, Linux, CentOS, OpenSUSE, etc.).

Read the entire article here.

Online Guitar School Using Digital Forensic Experts

March 31, 2020

According to Infosecurity magazine, digital forensic analysis is underway after a recent data breach that has potentially allowed hackers to access the personal data of millions of users of an online guitar school based in Florida. The website TrueFire.com was apparently compromised in early August 2019 but the breach was not discovered until January 10^th, 2020. This left hackers with months of access to the site during which time they may have been able to harvest not only the current user data but the payment information for ongoing purchases. Luckily, the website did not store payment information long term so only payment information used during this period is thought to have potentially been affected, however, the breach is still under forensic investigation.

Email: sensei@senseient.com Phone: 703.359.0700
Digital Forensics/Cybersecurity/Information Technology
https://senseient.com/services/digital-forensics

Ransomware as a Data Breach: An Evolving Threat

March 30, 2020

It is hard to believe there was such a thing as “the good old days of ransomware,” but we might be forgiven for looking back nostalgically. While ransomware was a bloody nuisance, law firms generally felt protected if they had a well-engineered backup system to facilitate recovery.

With multiple backups, usually in the cloud, or (with small firms) on two or more external USB drives, you could ignore the badgering requests to pay the ransom, the clocks counting down to when your data would be totally inaccessible, etc.

The trick was always to have multiple backups so that a single backup solution didn’t leave you vulnerable to having all your data encrypted if you were struck by ransomware while backing up. Having that “virgin” backup meant you could restore the data. This of course assumes that you regularly performed test restores on your backups to make sure you could indeed restore data from them.

Good guys, 1 — bad guys, 0.

The exception was often in the health-care industry, where lives were at stake and taking the time required to restore data might cost lives. Often, those entities paid up—and once the cybercriminal discovered that, health-care entities were targeted.

If you are scratching your head about all the state and city governments that were brought to their knees by ransomware in the last two years, you should know that their backups were not properly engineered. In fact, they were a mess. The cleanup took forever and cost millions of dollars. Many local and state government agencies never understood what constituted properly engineered backups—nor did they budget for it. Even now, they are more likely to get cyber insurance to cover the risk than to adequately address the baseline problems.

Read the entire article here.