Recently it has been reported that about 45% of IT security personnel are dealing with extensive issues resulting from employees clicking on email links and attachments that download malware and phishing attacks. Osterman Research issued its “Best Practices for Dealing with Phishing and Next-Generation Malware” in April . Stories included described real-life situations in which law firms lost hundreds of thousands of dollars to cyber attacks. Here are three key takeaways :

  • Users are sharing more information through social media as cybercriminals are refining their tactics, and unfortunately many current anti-phishing solutions are proving insufficient. This makes companies and groups more susceptible to cyber attacks.
  • Organizations should execute a training program that will raise their employees’ awareness of phishing attempts and other possible attacks, so users become the first line of defense in any security infrastructure.
  • Business and IT decision makers should put forth best practices to help their users screen electronic communication and collaboration for social engineering attacks more carefully.

Article via Above The Law, 20 May 2015

Photo: Macbook Pro via Warren R.M. Stuart [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs]

Speakers at Avvo’s sixth annual Lawyernomics conference discussed how the legal profession will function in the next five to ten years. Avvo CEO Mark Britton noted that lawyers are leaving opportunities on the table by not addressing commoditized work. Attorneys aren’t providing certain services to their clients yet look negatively upon nonlawyers who try to do it themselves. Automating work through “freemium” models such as Rocket Matter can help attorneys create strong relationships with potential and current clients while allowing lawyers to avoid the work they don’t want to do, according to Britton.

F. Daniel Siciliano, a professor at Stanford Law School, asserted that, as law becomes readily available to the public and more open-sourced, clients will no longer need lawyers. He had done research that ultimately indicated that, when a targeted immigration law office relied less on human employees and more on technology, it was 10 times more profitable than offices with traditional revenue models. According to Dave Schappell, startup business development manager at Amazon Web Services, a lawyers should be investing in is the Cloud, an option that has been ignored by many attorneys. Plenty of major companies and government agencies already run on the Cloud, increasing agility and encouraging innovation by lowering risk, Schappell says. While the legal profession may be going through chaotic changes, it is important that they create a strong culture of client service and remain true to their values.

Article via ABA Journal, 18 May 2015

Photo: Law Books via Mr.TinDC [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs]

A London-based startup, CrowdJustice, has emerged and hopes to help communities fund legal action. The startup, founded by ex-UN lawyer Julia Salasky, is a crowdfunding platform for public interest litigation. The group’s goal is to provide access to justice for poorly-funded legal cases through the Kickstarter model. According to Salasky, CrowdJustice let’s communities come together to access the court system and protect their shared values and assets. The types of cases CrowdJustice features could vary from local to nationally-based issues. Until recently, there really wasn’t a means for communities to take advantage of the finances and energy of the community as a whole; typical public interest cases relied on the financial sacrifice of a few individuals.

Article via TechCrunch, 22 May 2015

Photo: 104:365 – a little justice via orangesparrow [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs]

 

The ability to connect attorneys with potential clients in drunken driving cases, potentially before they are ticketed, is now possible due to the new smartphone app, the Duey Dialer. According to developer Daniel Delgado, the application allows a driver to trigger a traffic stop audio recording with the touch of a button and even contacts a lawyer with expertise in drunken driving cases automatically if not turned off within 45 minutes. The information sent includes the audio recording, location, identity, home address and contact information of the client. The attorneys pay for the app, which is available for Android use only and is currently used in six states.

Article via ABA Journal, 26 May 2015

Photo: Police Lights via J J  [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs]

 

Facebook, Google, Apple and Twitter, along with more than 75 companies and cyber security experts, sent a letter to President Obama on Tuesday, asking him to reject government proposals that would grant law enforcement access to their user’s encrypted data. The letter said that providing law enforcement access to their user’s data will leave them vulnerable to attacks and compromise their products, and asked Obama to reject proposals to force a “back door” into their operating systems. The efforts from several major tech companies to make data more secure precedes the open letter. They also requested that the White House focus on creating policies that advocate strong encryption technology and thus cyber security, human rights and economic growth. Law enforcement does not seem to agree however. Google and Apple were criticized for making their smartphone encryption too difficult for law enforcement to crack, and one official doesn’t understand why businesses market devices to purposefully allow users to escape the law’s reach.

Article via Mashable, 19 May 2015

Photo: Campaigning with a smile (Barack Obama in Austin #3) via Jack Thielepape/jmtimages [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs]

 

On Wednesday, April 29, the US Department of Justice released guidance titled “Best Practices for Victim Response and Reporting of Cyber Incidents.” The guidance outlines steps companies should take before, during, and after an incident, and includes a summary checklist. The guidance also states the Justice Department’s positions on the legal permissibility of a number of monitoring techniques and the impermissibility of many forms of so-called “hacking back.”

 

[Guidelines are here .]

Source: Department of Justice issues best practices guidance on cyber incidents (WilmerHale, 1 May 2015) via MIRLN (miscellaneous IT related law news)

Photo: Washington DC – Federal Triangle: Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building via Wally Gobetz [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs]