Email Threats and What Your Law Firm Can Do About Them

“Time to go Phishing,” says every hacker in the world. The biggest vulnerability in our systems today are the constant email threats flowing into our computers exposing our human nature. What can I say…we’re human. Hackers know that, unlike machines, humans are emotional beings, which leaves us vulnerable to things like the instant gratification we get when we get funny pictures from our colleagues or the fear of upsetting management by slowing down a process.

Email threats are the quickest way to the heart of a network.

Most law firm staff spend a large part of the day shifting through messages, deleting, sorting, deciding which ones to respond to right away and save for later. Then every once in a while a perfectly legitimate looking personalized email will sneak in with an attractive or urgent subject line and asks the recipient to do something NOW. The majority of people that receive this email will ignore it, delete it, or may even flag it as spam, but the hacker just needs one. It’s a numbers game and the odds are in favor of the infiltrator that thinks, “If I cast a big enough net, I’m going to catch something.” This, my legal friend, is called phishing. (Wikipedia)

Once cyber criminals have exposed our human nature and penetrated our networks, their technical skills are further challenged by another adversary: your cyber security system, but that’s for another article and conversation.

The main point is that your email systems, whether they are hosted onsite or with Microsoft Office 365, still require security measures in place to protect yourself from email threats that expose our human nature.

That is why we partnered up with Barracuda to host a webinar on email security and how to protect your law firm’s data.