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Sensei Article Featured In Oregon State Bar Bulletin

January 7, 2021

“What Working from Home has Taught Us about Cybersecurity Lessons Learned” by Sharon D. Nelson and John W. Simek was featured in December 2020 edition of the  Oregon State Bar Bulletin.

Excerpt:

The year 2020 will be remembered as the moment in time when lawyers were catapulted into the future. As a result of COVID-19, the majority of law firms suddenly found themselves thrust into a work-from-home environment. Some were prepared for working remotely, but many were not.

We’ve helped a lot of lawyers transition to a different working environment by providing training and implementing new technologies in their practice. Along the way, we’ve learned some things about how lawyers have responded to the pandemic. Here are 10 cybersecurity lessons we’ve learned this year about working from home:

  1. Home networks are 3.5 times more likely than corporate networks to have at least one family of malware. A study by BitSight analyzed data from 41,000 U.S. companies. The study found that 25 percent of devices (e.g. printers, computers, IoT devices, etc.) on a home network had services exposed to the internet. Another scary statistic is that “nearly one in two organizations (45 percent) had one or more devices accessing its corporate network from a home network with at least one malware infection.” Ouch.

  1. Sharing the device you use for law firm work with family members is a bad idea. Devices used to access the law firm network and work on confidential client data should only be used for that purpose. Family members should not be using the same device, even if there is a separate login ID and password for the device. If a family member inadvertently performs an action that allows the installation of malware, client data and law firm access could be compromised.

  1. Zoom is currently the choice of clients/potential clients. Teams, Webex, Zoom and GoToMeeting are all good video conferencing platforms. The reality is that Zoom is the technology of choice for your current and potential clients. All the other platforms are playing catch-up to Zoom. Despite some early histrionic media reports, you can now use Zoom securely for client communications.

Read the entire article here. (page 48)