Cybersecurity for Law Firms: Top 3 Tips

How can I start actually engaging with my firm's cybersecurity posture? Welcome to Legal Marketing 101. I'm Toby Rosen and today we are talking about cybersecurity. Of course, this is a particularly broad topic and if I wanted to, I could basically shift the entire podcast towards cybersecurity, and I'm sure I'd have plenty of content to share. However, this is a marketing podcast and we're going to stay focused on marketing. But if we wanted to stay focused, we need to be secure. So today we're going to be talking about my top three cybersecurity tips for lawyers, and most of them have some direct relation to the marketing services you're using, whether it's two-factor authentication for Google Ads or even just keeping software on your machine up to date. These tips have a direct relation to your advertising and, more importantly, they're critical to keeping your advertising online. What we're not going to talk about today is threat vectors or different types of hacks or or malware, or all the ways that cybersecurity issues can bring your marketing and your business to its knees. You should know all of that already, and you should already be appropriately afraid of these issues. Today, we're just going to skip ahead and talk about the three ways you can prevent issues from cropping up and you'll be able to keep things running smoothly. So let's get started.

Tip number one implement strong passwords, use a password manager and implement multi-factor authentication wherever and whenever possible. I am sure you've been hearing this for years, but the reason is because it works. As silly and trumped up as it may sound, passwords are the first line of defense against unauthorized access to your firm's digital resources. Weak or reused passwords are a major vulnerability and these are often exploited by cybercriminals to gain access to sensitive information. Obviously, with a password breach, the stakes are high because an attacker can really quickly gain access to significant client and maybe even financial information, and you can see how this can lead to severe damage on a couple of fronts. Fortunately, solving this is pretty simple. You just need to implement a strong password policy and enforce it. A strong password is typically at least 12 characters long and includes a mix of upper and lowercase letters, includes numbers and some special characters like exclamation points, question marks, that kind of stuff. You can avoid common words. That'll help avoid phrases that are common and avoid easily guessable information like birthdays, names, that kind of stuff. You've seen all these recommendations before and you've seen how it can go badly in movies and TV shows, and most sites have these as requirements for creating a password, so you should be doing this Somehow.

When I get passwords from you guys, for whatever reason, most of them are very weak. Of course, this does also present the issue of storing and cataloging these passwords, and this is where password managers come into play. Password managers like 1Password, for instance, can generate and store complex, unique passwords for all of your accounts. This significantly reduces the risk of password reuse and makes it easier for users to manage their credentials securely. You can implement this for your entire team, and at this point I recommend enforcing the use of a password manager for all staff members. There is nobody left who does not need it at this point, and the cost of the service is incredibly minute compared to the damage that a leaked password can do.

But while strong passwords are essential, they are not foolproof. That's not the end of the story. Passwords can be compromised through phishing attacks or malware or other methods, which we're going to talk about a little bit more later, and we're going to do that more in other episodes. But what you want to do here is add one more layer of security so we can implement multi-factor authentication across all accounts. This is sometimes called two-factor authentication or 2FA, but it basically just means the system you're logging into requires you to provide some additional verification to gain access to an application or to an online account. And in the cybersecurity world, these factors when we're talking about multifactor, they're defined as something you know, like your password, or something you have, like a physical device, like a smartphone or something you are like biometric verification, like a fingerprint or facial recognition apps like Google Authenticator or Authy hardware tokens like YubiKeys from Yubico, and biometric verification like a face scan or a fingerprint, things you can do on your iPhone or your computer. All of these factors play a role in our security posture, but it is important to note that of these methods I noted, you want to avoid SMS to a Faye when possible. Sms is just vulnerable to a bunch of different things and particularly SIM swapping attacks. So it's really just best to leave that alone if you have another option like Google Authenticator.

So let's move on to tip number two because, unlike 2FA, this is not often forgotten, but similar to 2FA, it can be kind of an annoying burden, and that's regularly updating and patching your software. Keeping your software up to date is absolutely critical for maintaining the security and efficiency of your law firm's IT structure. This isn't just so that the software can perform at its maximum capacity. Software updates often include patches for security vulnerabilities that have been discovered since the last version was released. Failing to apply these updates can leave your system exposed to attacks that exploit these vulnerabilities, and obviously the stakes are pretty high in this scenario. These vulnerabilities that could exist can be in any software component. They can be anywhere in the stack, and this includes operating systems, applications, web browsers, plugins, and hackers frequently exploit these known vulnerabilities just by scanning networks for any weaknesses, because they already know what they're looking for. So, as a result, effective patch management is essential to ensure that all the software used within your law firm is up to date.

Patch management involves identifying, acquiring, testing and installing patches these code changes for software systems and this is complicated, takes a long time and it's generally just an annoyance. So, to get around this annoyance, what I recommend is looking into a device management platform for your team to solve this. We're not going to go through the steps for this today, because it's a little bit extracurricular and it's just there's more to it than just what we can do today. But just go look at some device and software management options for your team. There's some really awesome tools that centralize this process. They automatically run the updating stuff you want to do and they'll alert you to any issues that any of your team might have. But in general, the easy way to solve this is by just enabling automatic updates for all of your team's machines. But again, that could be easier said than done, depending on your team's tech configuration. And we're moving on, but seriously, don't move on from the updates just because I only talked about it for a minute. You need to do these.

And last but not least, tip number three is to regularly conduct security audits and security posture evaluation. When we talk about an audit in the cybersecurity sense, what we're really trying to do is identify vulnerabilities in our system, both human and technological, and then work to rectify those vulnerabilities. This in and of itself, isn't that difficult to do, but doing it regularly is where people really slip up. These audits should be done as often as possible. There are some big companies that are constantly doing this, literally every single day, because they have an entire cybersecurity division, but for most of us, quarterly or biannually or even annually, this is going to be a lot more feasible, but the key thing here is to schedule the audits and don't skip them, don't put them off. Run them. When we're running an audit, we can also ensure that we're compliant with any relevant regulations or standards too.

This is sort of a two bird situation. So this could be state bar restrictions on data or things like changes to privacy laws in your state or your country, and that's just going to depend on where you are and how long it's been since you last updated your systems. Looking at you, california and all you CCPA lacking people. So you might be able to undertake this audit on your own, or you may just want to bring in an expert to do that for you. That will probably depend on the scale of your systems and what kind of budget you have, but there could be other reasons to bring in an expert to assess the situation. You could have an issue or something specific that you're looking for. That's complicated. Nonetheless, we're trying to cover a few key things with an audit, so here's what you need to know about when you talk to contractors.

Number one is network security Assessing the security of your network infrastructure, including things like your firewalls, your routers, switches and your intrusion detection and prevention systems. This is all under network security, and obviously this becomes much more complicated if you have a remote team, but auditing each team member's setup could end up being necessary. Another solution I've seen used in this situation that I don't entirely recommend, but some large companies are known to require employees to access all company material via a custom VPN installation. It's a little wonky, but it's another way to deal with remote network security. Number two is data protection. We want to evaluate all the measures in place for protecting sensitive client information and sensitive business information, such as encryption, access controls and our data backup procedures and storage conditions. Number three is our access controls across the board, reviewing user access levels and permissions to ensure that only authorized personnel have access to sensitive information. This applies not only to client-related applications, but to things like marketing applications and in-house software as well.

And number four is incident response. We're assessing the readiness and the effectiveness of your incident response plan, including how quickly and efficiently your team can respond to a security breach. This can feel a little nebulous, especially if you don't currently have a plan to respond to a cybersecurity incident, but trust me, this is an important one to have. A good audit is going to help you evaluate these key elements of your cybersecurity and will help you create a plan to implement fixes for everything you're lacking.

On and beyond that, you might find that consultants offer penetration testing or pen testing, which will help you identify additional vulnerabilities. For many firms that are operating with primarily cloud-based services, this is probably less necessary, but for a lot of us, it could still be useful. And, unlike security audits, which are just comprehensive reviews of your entire security posture, pen tests focus specifically on finding exploitable weaknesses. Pen testing helps us understand how an attacker could potentially gain unauthorized access to our systems and the impact such an intrusion might have on our firm. Both security audits and things like penetration testing should be conducted regularly, at least annually, like I said, or whenever significant changes are made to your infrastructure.

That's another important one. Regular reviews like this and updates to your security measures that ensure that new vulnerabilities are being identified and addressed are absolutely critical, and these systems, the scheduling, that's what's going to make sure that this gets done, and I know I said that we're not going to spend too much time on cybersecurity, since this is, in fact, a marketing podcast, but I have to say that we will be back with more cybersecurity episodes in the future, because I do have more to say on this subject. So keep an eye out for those. Next week we'll be back with more on marketing and we're going to have some cool AI stuff coming up very soon. That's it for Legal Marketing 101. Check out RosenAdvertisingcom for more. Thanks,