It is easy to underestimate the term ransomware as just being another technical term to confuse the lay person in the baffling world of technology jargon.
But the operative word is ‘ransom’, recent high-profile cases brought to the world’s attention the seriousness of this form of cyber-attack. As large organisation are held to ransom, it highlights that cyber extortion is a serious threat which can cause great uncertainty for any business.
With Ransomware servers on your own premises are the primary target because of their vulnerability. Your staff are busy and are not trained on cyber security and cyber criminals are cunning. It is very easy for any one of us to make an innocent mistake that can have disastrous consequences for your business.
Ransomware can insinuate itself into your system when one of your staff opens an e-mail, it installs a small application that starts encrypting all your files. This means you cannot access your own data, even though the server might be standing safely on your premises. The only way you can unencrypt your data is by paying a ransom to get a code that unencrypts the files.
While this sounds simple enough it can be disastrous. You need to communicate with criminals via the dark web and you often required to pay in bit coins. All of this takes a long time to figure it out and there is no guarantee that you will get the code in the end. It can take days or weeks to resolve and your firm can be at a standstill while it occurs.
The instances of ransomware are growing as these cyber criminals are successful and grow more brazen. If running on in-house servers, the chances of it happening to your businesses is on the increase.
Your client’s data is precious to them, and to you. It is better to prevent the problem than deal with it when it happens.
For law firms, adopting a cloud based case management system means your client and matter information is stored in high security data centres and not your on-premise servers. Your system will be protected against Ransomware without you having to worry about it.
To remain on an existing ageing on-premise server configuration, you become more and more vulnerable to a Ransomware attack, because it is hosted at your office on your own servers you don’t have the protections of an isolated cloud server.
For further information on how to secure your law firm against cyber criminals download Cyber risks: How Safe is Safe?
