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Last month “The Ransomware Epidemic and How to Protect Your Law Firm” by Sensei’s Sharon Nelson and John Simek was featured in the NOVA ALA’s June White Papers.

The Association of Legal Administrators (ALA), the premier management resource for the legal profession, is the largest association representing legal administrators around the world. ALA’s mission is to “promote and enhance the competence and professionalism of legal administrators and all members of the management team.”

Excerpt: Remember the good old days of ransomware? You would get an e-mail saying that you owed the IRS money and could pay it via a helpfully included link. Lots of people did this because it was only a couple of hundred dollars. And who wants to duke it out with the IRS? The same dull-witted people fell for the e-mail claiming that someone at your home had downloaded music or movies illegally (much more likely true than the first scenario) and you needed to pay a fine so no one would come after you (or your spouse/child) for a much greater sum. Again, the price was relatively small and many people paid.

The likelihood that a lawyer would fall for these primitive versions of ransomware was small. Fast forward to the days of Cryptolocker which began in 2013. This ransomware Trojan attacked computers running Microsoft Windows, propagating itself by getting a user to click on an attachment or a link contained in an e-mail. Click on the link or attachment and “Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner” the malware invisibly downloaded and began to encrypt your files. The malware encrypted files stored locally on the computer system as well as on any mapped network drives, such as those files on your server, connected flash drives and other external USB drives.

Read the entire article here.