Consumers often worry about data privacy. After all, how awful would it be if you made an online purchase, as you often do, but this time, scammers stole your credit card number and maxed out your credit card at restaurants that are not within commuting distance of your home? How terrible would it be if you entered your bank account number and date of birth, and scammers used this information to open accounts in your name without your knowledge, wrecking your finances in the process?
These are not just the paranoid fantasies of lonely grandmothers who quickly click to forward any content that makes the worry centers in their brains light up. If you think it is a nightmare when one person’s data gets stolen, imagine when hundreds of people’s financial information falls into the hands of fraudsters, when you were the one legally responsible for protecting it. Cyber attackers are opportunists, meaning that family law attorneys are as vulnerable to data theft and the ensuing legal disasters as any other businesses, so applying a thorough cybersecurity strategy is important.
Why Cybersecurity is Important for Family Law Firms
As a lawyer, you know how expensive legal disputes are. Think about all the current and former clients whose financial information is stored on your law firm’s computer network. Anyone who has ever paid you, or anyone you have ever paid, is vulnerable to identity theft if hackers breach your law firm’s devices. If data thieves manage to hack into your computer network and steal credit card numbers or, worse, Social Security numbers, then all the clients and employees who suffer financial losses have the right to sue you for the financial losses they incurred because of the identity theft because it is your responsibility to protect your computers and the information stored on them from preventable events like these.
If you need a legal analogy to help you understand this, consider that customers who get injured at a restaurant have the right to sue for premises liability not only if a customer gets injured after slipping and falling on a wet floor, but also if a customer gets injured in an assault by an unruly patron. In the former case, the restaurant failed to prevent the accident by not inspecting the floors or placing a “caution” sign. In the latter case, the restaurant failed to prevent the accident by not providing adequate security to break up the fight before it escalated.
Likewise, it is your responsibility to protect your clients and employees from cyber attacks. Consider that a major corporation settled a class action lawsuit after thousands of its customers and employees became targets of data theft after a virus attacked its computer systems. Windows had designed a patch to protect against the virus, but the company had not yet installed it, meaning that the company that suffered the cyber attack had breached its duty of care toward its customers.
Hire a Professional to Build and Implement a Cybersecurity Strategy, Even if You are on a Shoestring Budget
Even if you are sufficiently tech-savvy that family members ask you to help them troubleshoot their computer problems instead of doing the other way around, you probably do not know where to begin with cybersecurity strategy. This is because cybercrime threats are always emerging, and so is the response to them. The biggest law firms employ a cybersecurity staff full-time, but no one expects you to do this. Instead, you should engage the services of a cybersecurity firm on a contracting basis.
The cybersecurity firm should inspect your law firm’s computer network for vulnerabilities. Then it should recommend ways to follow best practices to prevent cyber attacks. This might include storing data on cloud-based software instead of directly on your devices. It might be as simple as installing updates to your operating system. You should have the cybersecurity team audit your cybersecurity strategy at least once per year.
The Extra Time Your Employees Spend Logging in Could Save You Money on Data Breach Litigation
An effective cybersecurity technique that is easy to implement is two-factor authentication, also known as two-factor authentication. Without it, employees can log into a company device or the cloud that stores your company’s files simply by entering a username and password. Two-factor authentication means that, when the employee enters a password, this prompts the system to take the employee to another step, such as clicking “confirm” on his or her phone, to confirm that the employee is the one trying to log into a company computer. Security questions and choosing a verification image after entering a password are other popular forms of two-factor authentication.
Sources
https://www.cisa.gov/topics/cybersecurity-best-practices
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