An out-of-town meeting meant that I missed the cyber security seminar given by Navigant in London on 10 May. The speaker, as I wrote here, was Bob Anderson who heads Navigant’s growing Global Information Security Practice.
Legal IT Insider carries a short article called It’s just a matter of time”: Navigant ex-FBI director warns UK law firms to act on cybercrime” with a message from Bob Anderson addressed specifically to law firms.
US law firms have already been attacked, and if we have not yet heard much about it happening in the UK, that will not be true for long. What is obvious, as Bob Anderson says, is that “The bad guys go where the data is and law firms have an immense amount of data and traditionally have had no idea how to protect it”.
Protection, as I have said elsewhere, is partly a matter of owning and using the fast-developing technology which is available to counter the threats; part of it is the creation of appropriate policies; part of it involves giving training and advice to staff, and backing that up with testing and enforcement.
If nothing else, law firms should know how they will react when (not if) they are hit by cybercrime. As Bob Anderson says in the Legal IT Insider article, “This is an issue people should be looking at, whether they use Navigant or somebody else”.
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