Legal Research

Don?t Give Away Your Key?

By David Bilinsky

? Don’t go breaking my heart
You take the weight off me
Honey when you knock on my door
I gave you my key…?

Lyrics and music by Sir Elton John and Bernie Taupin, recorded by Sir Elton John and Kiki Dee.

There is a disturbing post today to the IT Blog entitled: Computer Breaking and Entering is a Business.

Aside from the statement that 80% of the PC hack attacks come about thru vulnerabilities in Adobe Acrobat’s Reader (based on a report from ScanSafe, a Cisco company), the acknowledgment that there is an elephant in the room is a good thing, in my opinion.

ScanSafe’s data indicates that what the cyber-criminals are really going for are specific vertical industries.

We already know that lawyers and law offices are targets.

Worse still, ScanSafe stats that, “No malware is easily detectable. On average, even given four possible points of detection (the email, the website, the exploit and the dropper), the miss-rate with traditional signature scanners is near 40%.”

Who are these people?

Some of these are used by private individuals for profits. In some cases, though, they seem to be working hand in glove with rogue governments like China. No matter who’s behind the software, these botnets are being used to break into and steal secrets from both public companies like Adobe and Google to no one knows how many private businesses.

What is the lesson for lawyers?

The bottom line, as useful as the Internet is, you’ve got to be more cautious than ever about you and your business uses it. In particular, if you’re working in a line that criminals want to attack, I don’t think that you can be too paranoid with your PC and network security defenses. After all, your attackers are businesses just like yours in search of a quick profit.

For lawyers, we want to ensure that when hackers come knocking on our door that we haven’t already given away the key…

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on February 19, 2010 (boomark / email).