How Secure Are Your Law Firm’s Digital Defences?
Get a digital checkup.
Given this week’s news of attempts by “ransomware hackers” to extort payments from three British Colombia law firms by hijacking and blocking access to the firms’ confidential data, that will be my firm’s tech step #1 – and is my first Practice Tip – of the year.
Get a digital checkup.
Like it or not, law firms are increasingly vulnerable to malicious actors online; we are also perpetually vulnerable to the consequences of our own neglect within.
One solution to these very real threats is to institute an Annual Digital Checkup for your firm.
Have a qualified professional inspect your systems to identify any potential vulnerabilities, and to provide recommendations as to any necessary steps your firm should be taking to protect its data.
In an era where it has become predictable that hackings and security breaches will regularly affect even the largest and most secure of our nation’s institutions and enterprises, lawyers need to become more proactive in fulfilling our basic ethical duty to protect our digital data through appropriate security safeguards, backup procedures and in-house computer-use policies.
Where does your firm stand on this? How well do you protect your digital data?
As a basic step, we should all get a professional opinion on the state of our digital defenses. I fear that many of us might be surprised by the results.
It’s a dangerous cyberworld out there.
(And happy 2015, too.)
As much as technology has helped us in this era, it can also be said that technology can also be our undoing if it is used the wrong way. I personal feel that things like personal data from hospitals, law first and banks should be put on the internet. It presents a lot of risks that people are constantly trying to exploit. Nothing on the internet is 100% safe.
Eric | http://www.simonlawva.com
I pro tip I have heard from a lot of experts is to have all your documents stored on a local database, or recorded on paper. By local database, I mean one with only wired access points, and the wired access points should be WiFi based, this will ensure both description, and a certain measure of preventing people form taping into the signal since WiFi sends data through light pulses.
Eric | http://www.woitasmcleodlaw.ca.