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Sensei Pens Column For Above The Law

December 8, 2021

Above the Law featured Sensei article entitled “Law Firms Stagger Through Ransomware Attacks” by Sharon Nelson, John Simek and Michael Maschke. This article is the first in a new monthly series called Cybersecurity: Tips From the Trenches with Sharon Nelson, Esq., John Simek and Michael Maschke of Sensei Enterprises. As noted authors and lecturers, Sharon, John and Michael speak on a variety of IT, Cybersecurity and Digital Forensics subjects. They lecture throughout North America and have been interviewed by TIME, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Reuters, many newspapers and even Oprah Winfrey’s O magazine.

They are co-authors of eighteen books published by the American Bar Association on these topics.

Excerpt:

As the ransomware gangs move from big game to mid-size game, what’s a law firm to do?

The Good Old Days of Ransomware

Yes, there really were “the good old days of ransomware.” We call it Ransomware Version 1.0. The ransomware “landed” in your network, encrypted your data and presented a ransom to get the decryption key that would decrypt your data. Quite an innocent era by contrast with Ransomware Version 2.0, which preceded the pandemic, but then flourished as lawyers headed home to insecure home networks in March of 2020.

The Devil That is Ransomware Version 2.0

The ransomware gangs figured out that two ransoms were better than one. So now ransomware attacks steal your data before they encrypt your network. If you’ve really built a resilient network, you may be able to recover without paying the ransom. On the other hand, there may be so much downtime and lost productivity that you decide to pay anyway – especially if the payment is picked up by your cyberinsurance company.

Relatively recently, attacks include searching out and destroying any backups connected to the network – and also disabling or end-running the very software you have running to detect a ransomware attack.

Read the entire article here.