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Half of law office computers infected
RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers
Published: October 31, 2014
The American Bar Association’s annual tech survey is always good for a few eye-opening statistics. It is still pretty much the Wild West out there, as far as law firm computer security goes.
According to the latest survey, nearly one-half of all law firm computers in the past year became infected with a virus, spyware or other malware during 2013. And those are just the firms that actually knew that, so personally I would place the percentage at a much higher number.
And that number does not include the numbers of lost and stolen smartphones, laptops and tablets, or security hacks of various kinds, including physical break-ins—14 percent of firms reported those losses. That they know of.
At the same time, law firm computer security continues to lag behind the rest of the world, with only a quarter of surveyed phones encrypting their email, for instance.
To be fair, the infection rate is down from 2011, when nearly 55 percent of firms reported them.
And email encryption is more common at large firms (35 percent) than at smaller firms.
But still, these security problems put every single firm at risk for compromising client and internal firm data.
Drilling down into the survey a bit,
A plurality of security issues seem to occur in mid-size firms (10-49 lawyers), compared to smaller or larger (500+) firms, stats that have been constant for the last four years.
Of firms whose data was breached, only a little over a quarter of the respondents reported that these issues caused a business disruption, and only 1 percent reported that client data was compromised and 8 percent reported data destruction.
But only 5 percent of firms who had security breaches told their clients about it. Seriously?
And, still, by other findings in the report, half of the firms out there are not putting enough serious effort into security.
For instance, less than 60 percent of firms had a disaster recovery plan, and more than 20 percent of respondents didn’t even know if their firm had one. And only half of the firms back their data up at least daily.
Yes, all of this means that something like half of the law firms out there still do not take computer security seriously. Is your firm one of those?