Cybersecurity for Law Firms

The Legal Helm Bonus Episode: Cybersecurity for Law Firms

Estimated reading time: 12 minutes

In addition to Halloween, October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month. To mark the occasion, we’re bringing you this bonus episode dedicated to cybersecurity. Our host Bim Dave talks with Helm360’s cybersecurity expert, Anbu Thangamuthu, about how the COVID pandemic is spurring on cyber-crime, best practices for protecting your law firm and new threats to watch out for.

YOUR SPEAKERS  

Bim Dave is Helm360’s Executive Vice President. With 15+ years in the legal industry, his keen understanding of how law firms and lawyers use technology has propelled Helm360 to the industry’s forefront. A technical expert with a penchant for developing solutions that improve business systems and user experience, Bim has a knack for bringing high quality IT architects and developers together to create innovative, useable solutions to the legal arena.      

Anbazhagan “Anbu” Thangamuthu is a Helm360 Sales Director. He has 16+ years of IT experience covering various facets of delivery, people management and client relationship management for our international client base. Anbu frequently takes on challenging customer-facing roles and develops innovative solutions that help law firms use their technology more effectively. His keen insight into the legal industry and extensive technical expertise make him a cornerstone of our team.

TRANSCRIPT

Bim: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Legal Helm. Today I’m with Anbu, IT director here at Helm360. Anbu, welcome to the show.

Before we do a dive into the topic of cybersecurity, can you give our audience a little introduction, specifically your experience in the field of information technology.

Anbu: Nice to meet you Bim. My experience in IT, has been about 16+ years. I started with desktop support then service support and then the whole IT support with multiple technologies supporting servers, computer storage, backups, and networking and security.

Being with the industry for close to two decades, I would say security is a challenging thing because it’s a continuous process. We need to make sure you’re relevant and you’re updated with the technologies that evolve. That’s the continuous learning that I’m going through.

Bim: Let me share a couple of stats I recently read just to give context to the conversation.

• Cyber-crime is up by 600% due to COVID-19 pandemic. Very interesting. Obviously with cyber criminals taking advantage of the fact that a lot was going on with COVID-19 and led to opportunities to target specific areas and individuals as well as businesses.
• 43% of cyber-attacks are targeted at small business. So, although there’s ongoing attacks to big business and large corporations, there is a significant percentage of cyber-attacks which are specifically targeted at small businesses
• Finally, 95% of cybersecurity breaches are as a result of human error. Hopefully we can dig into a this little bit because that’s the kind of stats that stand out when we think about security and security breaches.

Obviously, we as humans contribute to the statistics we see and some of the things that we can do to prevent them.

What would you say are the biggest cybersecurity threats facing firms?

Anbu: Firms are facing four critical cybersecurity threats.

The first is social hacking, which is called phishing. It’s a social engineering hacking That is first and foremost.

The second is ransomware. Because people are working from home, they just click on the links that they want. They don’t care much about what’s going to happen after clicking the links. They just click the links and they get ransomware and malware installed on their computers.

The third is the unpatched systems. These impact systems that are not current and up-to-date. What happens is when people connect from home they don’t get the proper updates like do when they’re connected in the office. The cyber criminals take advantage of this and steal data.

The fourth is weak passwords. This is one we’ve been telling, advising, and training people on. Use hard passwords. Don’t use weak passwords and repeated passwords. That’s one of the things that people have to take care of and yet usually don’t.

These four are the critical threads out there from the cybersecurity perspective.

Bim: So, if I’m a law firm today, maybe I’m a mid-sized law firm and I’m worried about cybersecurity; maybe there’s a specific attack that’s happened within my firm. What can I do now to prevent cyber-attacks from happening? What would be your recommendations in that area?.

Anbu: I would say there are three recommendations that I could make.

The first would be update your technologies. The most vulnerable systems are the outdated ones, like those that came with your equipment. Manufacturers send them out to the devices and the services are relevant to the cyber-attacks. So make sure your systems are updated with the current patches and hotfixes.

Second is be aware of the latest and current cybersecurity attacks. There are a lot of sophisticated attacks happening in the market. The one password concept is completely gone, but still people use just one password. From an IT perspective, we always recommend multifactor authentications. Keep passwords strong and complicated. Make sure your data is protected with your own personal security codes,

Third would be contact your IT department or team, if you find something. If you see something, say something, right? So, if you see something that’s not good happening, inform the team so they can make an assessment and take preventative actions.

And all these things are not just for you. If you get infected, your system gets infected, and it’s going to infect the whole company because your company is connected and your systems talk to different systems. So, if you get infected, everybody’s getting infected, They’re going to get everybody’s information on the networks. It’s not just your data.

You’ve got to be mindful about what you enter and what you share on website or when you click any link on the internet. That’s why you want to make sure that whenever you click on anything, make sure you double check it. You’re clicking the right link. 

Bim: I want to touch on something you just mentioned around multi-factor authentication. For those who aren’t fully familiar with that terminology, can you explain what that means- multifactorial?

Anbu: Traditionally, we know the password we’ve used since the day we started using computers. It’s one we use over and over. Those days are gone. There is a recent study that says more than 80% of security threats are because of weak passwords. Passwords are very important, but everybody uses repeated and weak passwords.

Multifactor authentication helps protect your information and your identity in a way that one password can’t. The multifactor authentication system sends you a second level password to your mobile or your personal email asking you to enter a one-time password before letting you into the corporate systems. This way, you have two passwords, one is your personal and the second one is the one-time password that you get on your mobile. That’s the multi-level. authentication method

You got to make sure you use a complex, strong password and then one time password to log into the system.. 

Bim: Thank you, Anbu. Moving on, you touched on this briefly and the kind of stats that we talked about earlier, where 95% of the breaches that happened tend to be focused around human error. And you talked about where we can change behavior by sharing information, letting your IT departments know when something is awry or something that you’re not sure about. What can firms do to really do a good job of educating staff? What would be your recommendations in that area to help firms reduce that percentage of errors being caused by a human clicking on the wrong thing and those kinds of mistakes that can contribute to cybersecurity threats.

Anbu: I would say training, training, training. The employees in the company need proper awareness training. They need to know what is happening in security. If they don’t learn the security stuff out there in the market, then you may be a victim of a security breach.

Make sure everybody gets awareness training. It’s not just a one-time thing. You have to make sure you keep sending the latest security information to the people. They read about it and get trained and get certified. Training is a very critical factor. If one person is not updated to the security threat, if he’s is not updated with the latest security, then, he may not be able to protect the data. Not just the data is data, but also the company information, right? Because he’s not just one person. He’s also connected to the systems within the company.

So training is very important. Awareness is very important. Understanding what’s going on in the security market is very important. All three are very important for any employees within the company. That’s the way to make sure everybody is following the security policies and has awareness.

Bim: Excellent. Thank you for that. I hear a lot about response and what an appropriate response to a security breach should be within an organization. Can you talk to us a little bit about that in terms of how would you define a good response to a security breach happening within an organization? What kind of things should we be considering? Are there any tools or processes that should be put in place to enable that to happen effectively? 

Anbu: Absolutely Bim. Let’s talk about the tools and technologies first then we’ll go to what should we do if, if at all.

Technology is playing a vital role in the whole cybersecurity market. I would say there are two key reasons: technology is fast and it’s reliable. The amount of growth that we see in the industry, especially in cybersecurity area, you have to be fast to be relevant to the industry, right? So, the technology is a key player in the whole market. So, you have to be relevant.

At the same time, it has to be fast and reliable as well. There are lots of tools out there in the market nowadays. Splunk is one of the market leaders in cybersecurity. It monitors and also it gives you recommendations. QRadar, from IBM is another technology out there in the market that helps. We as a company partner with companies like Bit Defender VBrute and FireEye.

All these security companies help us detect and respond to security incidents, you know. The right partnership helps us be relevant and updated with the security market that’s out there.

The second point is what should we do when a breach happens? Send out a simple, very precise communication. That’s very important because you have to make sure people are aware of the breach and the impact of the breach, right? If you’re not communicating the right information to the team, or the right information to the authorities, then you’re not going get the right impact calculated. So be simple, be honest, be concise.

Bim: Obviously a business, like a law firm, who is also considering some of the data that they host internally that could be sensitive client data. Should that response extend not just to, internal players within the organization, but also considering the fact that there’s actually a customer at the end of this, right, that also needs to be informed?

Anbu: Yes, they have to be informed. I would say everybody tied up into the whole data cycle. I would say this is our data cycle from a security perspective so customer, end-user, IT, and any government bodies that needs to be informed, make sure everybody’s informed in this whole cycle.

You have to be transparent within this system,. So again, those three points, right? Simple, honest, and concise. That’s very important with all four departments in the whole cycle. 

Bim: Excellent. Thank you. Finally, we hear a lot in the news about the dark web. This unknown quantity that is the dark web. Can you help our listeners understand what that actually means and why we need to know what it is?

Anbu: When you talk about dark web, is there white web? The other side of the internet industry is called the clear web. When we talk about the dark web, we should know about the clear web as well.

Now let’s talk about the simple analogy. When you go to clear web, when you go to Amazon, you buy legitimate things on Amazon. That’s a clear web analogy. And when you go to the dark web, you get things like stolen passwords, cracked passwords, somebody’s credit card information. The information being sold is not legitimate information. Not just personal information, but also some illegal activities happening out there that are not good for the community and not good for the industry.

If you ask me, the dark web is a hundred percent illegal. There are some good things as well, but when you, when you compare the good and bad, there are more bad things on the dark web so we’ve have to be careful about it. If you don’t want to be a victim of data being stolen or data being sold in a dark web, you’ve got to be careful about clicking links and clicking around social media. A lot of information being sold is being collected by social media. You have to be careful about. clicking the links. When you click links and provide information that’s collected by people out there in the dark web, your information is being sold on the dark web. And then, the aftermath. What happens when your personal information is stolen?

Bim: Thank you very much. It sounds like a very scary place.

Anbu: it is, it is. 

Bim: Anbu, thank you for sharing your knowledge on this important topic. October is cybersecurity awareness month and cybersecurity continues to be a challenge faced not only by the legal sector, but pretty much every individual on the planet, especially with the advent of so many different applications and tools that we use in our day-to-day life that are consuming data, storing data, and doing all sorts of interesting things with data. So, this is really, really pertinent.

And before I let you go, I just have a couple of final, rapid fire questions. If I can get a quick response on these.

First one is what is the biggest challenge you are facing today as an individual? Whether that be in business or non-business what’s the biggest challenge that you face?

Anbu: Biggest challenges is creating awareness among people about this IT security. Because although we give them the trainings, materials and information; getting the response in terms of receiving this information is not as good as we expect.

So we expect people to receive the information and respond with a positive note. You know, that’s what we expect and that’s a challenge, but we want to overcome the challenge as soon as possible/

Bim: Fantastic. And final question. Career to date, who’s been your most important mentor.

Anbu: I feel Sundar Pichai from Google is my personal mentor for many reasons. Of course, I do follow him a lot and so he is my mentor. 

Bim: Fantastic. Thank you, Anbu. Again, really great talking to you today. I appreciate you taking the time out to share your wisdom and knowledge on this topic.

Anbu: It’s my pleasure as well, Bim. It was good talking to you.

How’s your firm’s cybersecurity? Our experts are happy to review your safety plan and help you make it airtight. We can also help you arrange cybersecurity awareness training for your team. Contact us to learn more.