On 22 January 2013 I wrote about Practice Guidelines for the use of Cloud Computing by Lawyers. In preparing that blog I became concerned about security in my office. I recorded in that blog, many instances of security breaches to highly prominent organisations (Apple and Amazon Security Flaws, Blizzard suffers security breach, encrypted passwords and authenticator data compromised, Yahoo confirms server breach, over 400k accounts compromised, Dropbox confirms user info was stolen, Microsoft Store hacked in India, passwords stored in plain text, LinkedIn confirms security breach, ‘some passwords’ affected, and Chinese hackers target U.S. Chamber of Commerce, sensitive data stolen). Just last week Microsoft says it was also attacked by hackers, small number of PCs infected with malware | The Verge. Today the Asian Lawyer reports China Hacking Report Raises Alarm at Firms Whilst in Australia cases of cyber breaches may be less reported. Michael Lee reported on 18 February that Australian Law Enforcement laid charges in only 8% of reported cases when referring to a report issued by CERT Australia The Cyber Crime and Security Survey Report..That report also noted



255 of 450 organisations invited to complete the Survey responded (page 8).

The key findings for this survey include (page 5):

over 90% of respondents deployed firewalls, anti-spam filters and anti-virus software

two-thirds of respondents had documented incident management plans, however only 12% had a forensic plan

nearly two-thirds of organisations used IT security related standards

over two-thirds of respondents had staff with tertiary level IT security qualifications. Over half had vendor IT security certifications, whilst just under half had non-vendor IT security certifications

over 20% of organisations know they experienced a cyber incident in the previous 12 months, with 20% of these organisations experiencing more than 10 incidents .

Of the organisations which know they experienced cyber incidents:

17% suffered from loss of confidential or proprietary information , 16% encountered a denial-of-service attack, and 10% financial fraud



, 16% encountered a denial-of-service attack, and 44% reported the incident to a law enforcement agency, whereas only 13% sought a civil remedy through action from legal counsel

20% chose not to report the matter to a law enforcement agency because of the fear of negative publicity

because of the fear of negative publicity the most common responses as to why incidents were successful, were that they used powerful automated attack tools, or exploited unpatched or unprotected software vulnerabilities or misconfigured operating systems, applications or network devices

over half of all organisations have increased their expenditure on IT security in the previous 12 months.

…

Number of incidents experienced (page 17)



When asked if their organisation had experienced a cyber security incident in the previous 12 months:

69% of respondents reported ‘no’

22% of respondents reported ‘yes’, and

9% of respondents reported they ‘did not know’ .

.

While these results indicate the majority of organisations did not experience a cyber incident in the previous 12 months, this may more accurately reflect that a number of cyber intrusions have gone undetected by some organisations. Anecdotal evidence available to the CERT suggests that some businesses are unaware of the full scope of unauthorised activity on their networks.



The CERT is also aware of hesitation from organisations to report a cyber security incident. This may be for a variety of reasons – some are concerned that the information they report may lead to negative publicity and/or regulatory scrutiny, others don’t consider reporting to be worthwhile.

Of the respondents who reported their organisation had experienced an incident in the previous 12 months:

65% reported experiencing one to five incidents

21% reported experiencing more than 10 incidents

9% reported experiencing six to 10 incidents, and

5% did not know how many incidents had been experienced .

Types of incidents experienced (Page 18)

Of the respondents who reported their organisation had experienced a cyber incident in the previous 12 months, the main types reported were:

theft of a notebook, tablet or mobile devices – 32%

virus or worm infection – 28%

trojan or rootkit malware – 21%

unauthorised access – 18%



theft or breach of confidential information – 17%, and

denial-of-service attack – 16%.

Contributing factors to the attacks (page 24)

Respondents were asked what factors they thought may have contributed to the incidents. The highest rated reason was the use of powerful automated attack tools (14%), followed by exploitation of unpatched or unprotected software vulnerabilities (11%), and exploitation of misconfigured operating systems, applications or network devices (10%).

These findings highlight the need for organisations to stay vigilant to vulnerabilities and apply appropriate mitigations – specifically where misconfigured systems are the reason an attack was successful.

Further The Australian Defence Signals Directorate (“the DSD“), noted in the Executive Companion to the Australian Government Information Systems Manual:

In 2010, 88% of Fortune 500 companies had botnet activity connected to their Internet domains, and 60%had business email addresses compromised by malware (Page 3)

After Wikileaks released a large amount of classified US State Department cables in November 2010, online payment service provider PayPal terminated WikiLeaks’ account, thereby closing its principal method for receiving financial donations from supporters. Claiming to support transparency and counter-censorship, Anonymous organised a Distributed Denial of Service attack that shut down PayPal’s website, as well as those for Mastercard and Visa (page 4).

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission reported a loss of around $63 million from cyber crime and scams in 2010 [page 5).

41% of Employees use the same password for multiple accounts (page 12).

In the DSD further noted in the in the Principles Manual to the Australian Government Information Systems Manual:

A new piece of malware is created every 1.5 seconds (page 2)

Over 2010-2011, the number of mass, indiscriminate email-based attacks declined by more than half, but highly-personalised targeted attacks tripled. Cost-benefit decision-making is driving this trend, as although targeted attacks are estimated to cost five times more than mass attacks, the average value per victim can be forty times higher (page 2).

(page 2). There was a 46% surge in malicious software targeting mobile devices between late 2009 and late 2010 (page 5)

In 2011, 41% of data breaches were caused by a third party, namely outsourcers, cloud providers or business partners that handled or accessed the organisation’s information (page 15)

Three out of four companies across ten countries – including Australia – have security policies in place. However, 40% of employees and 20% of IT professionals did not know that the security policies existed

(page 16)

(page 16) During a 2011 information systems audit, 14 out of 15 Western Australian government agencies failed to detect, prevent or respond to suspicious scans of their Internet sites seeking to identify security weaknesses (page 21)

19 Australian companies in a 2010 study lost between 3,200 and 65,000 individual records from data breach incidents, with an average organisation cost per breach of $2 million (page 23)

from data breach incidents, (page 23) 85% of data breaches in 2011 took weeks or more to discover . In fact, over half of the breaches took months to discover (page 23)

. In fact, over half of the breaches took months to discover (page 23) 32% of Australian data breaches in 2010 were caused by employee negligence , representing a 3% increase since 2009 (page 24).

, representing a 3% increase since 2009 (page 24). In early 2011, the City of York Council in the United Kingdom was penalised by the Information Commissioner’s Office after papers containing sensitive personal data were mistakenly collected from a shared printer and posted to the wrong person (page 30).

In a research experiment, the Sophos Australia office discovered that 66% of the 50 USB drives they purchased from a public transport provider were infected with malicious software. They were able to uncover information about many of the former owners of the devices, as well as their family, friends and colleagues (page 34).

Web applications are the third most common intrusion vector and are associated with over a third of total data loss. (page 36)



An 8 character password with mixed case letters, numbers and symbols takes approximately 5 days to crack using a graphics processing unit in a standard home computer; however if the password was extended to 9 characters or more it would take over 18 months to crack.(page 40)

18% of Employees share their workstation passwords with co-workers (page 40).

(page 40). 44% of data breaches were a result of exploitation of default or guessable credentials (page 41).

(page 41). Mobile devices and laptops are the most likely endpoint from which serious cyber attacks are unleashed against an organisation. Over 2010-2011, 63% of attacks had an employee laptop or mobile device as their endpoin t (page 45) and

t (page 45) and More than 200,000 mobile phones are reported lost or stolen each year in Australia . This equates to 4,000 each week, or one mobile phone every 3 minutes (page 48).

WHAT SHOULD A LAW FIRM DO TO ENSURE its INFORMATION SECURITY? Information Security does not just mean Cyber Security. It must address security for all information media including hard copy, USB Sticks, inadvertent posting of faxing of material. It also need to address the preservation of that information, not merely protecting it from outside intrusion. I went to seminar just last week, where it was suggested that any law firm that catastrophically lost data stored on its server, without adequate backup, would most likely cease to exist in 18 months. That speaker also told of a situation where the company’s servers and primary backup media were both destroyed due water damage arising from a floor above. That company fortunately had external backup and was up and running within 8 hours. On 6 February 2013, Joe Patrice at Above the Law wrote an article When Luddites Handle Cyber Security, You End Up With American Law Firms. If I am a lawyer, and when it comes to the cyber security technology I am a luddite, the purpose of this blog is to not explain to you how to handle Cyber Security. That is far a too specialist area. However, that it important for law firms to treat Information Security systematically. Fortunately, there is a lot of information available to lawyers to assist them in developing those systems. International Standards for Information Security Management Systems have been available since about 1995. Most Security Information Guides appear to adopt the ISO/IEC 27000 Family of Standards which includes ISO/IEC/AS 27001 last published in 2005. There is new draft in preparation. Easier to understand are various guidelines, including the following freely available to review:

The Information Security Manuals prepared the Australian Signals Directorate

The Information Security Guideline prepared by the NSW Department of Finance and Services

Simpler guidelines, not adopting the rigour of ISO/IEC/AS 27001 but more closely related to the legal profession can be found in the following guidelines:

although those guidelines are more concerned with receipt of handling of information by barristers/counsel and predominantly to ensure the confidentiality of client information.

A further and very practical resource, but restricted to On Line Security is the Australian Government StaySmartOnLine Site.



That useful site provides very practical information. It makes very useful recommendations. Some of the important principles expressed in the 27001 standard are recommended but explained with less rigour and are easily put into practice. If a legal practice must adopt the 27001 Standards will depend upon its size, client base and sometimes client requirements. I expect it is more likely in future, that some clients, particularly government departments will require legal practices to have an Accredited Information Security Management System in place. Whether formal accreditation is required, or whether a formal or informal information security policy is needed, the law practice needs to at least consider the following matters

Identify All information Assets for example Electronically stored information and data Paper documents. Physical equipment, computers, facsimile machines, telephone communications; On line services, cloud services, etc. Identify the value of all Information Asset Values and assess the potential impact of loss or breach: For a legal practice the most economically valuable information asset will not be client information, but information stored on its practice management and trust accounting system. Second would be the knowledge stored in precedents and in other information systems. The preservation of the confidentiality of client information is similarly very important, particularly if it has high commercial value, or may be socially or media sensitive. As I have mentioned in my earlier post referred to above, the NSW Revised Professional Conduct and Practice Rules 1995 (“the Solicitor Rules”) s mandate both the retention of, and the preservation of the confidentiality of client information (rules 2 and 8). Ascertain the Threat to the Information Assets. Identify possible sources of threats. Hackers and Activists Inadvertent release of information by incorrect addressing of email, facsimile or post Employee sabotage Thieves Fraudsters Environment Fire and force majeure Employee negligence Inadvertent loss o Assess Vulnerabilities Password Weakness Remote Access Firewalls Shared Offices Social Engineering (staff inadvertently releasing information upon telephone enquiry) Office and building security Back up procedures Determine safeguard and policies, monitoring and reporting procedures.

Information security requires genuine commitment from all staff members. A documented and enforced policy is almost essential for all but the smallest practice. Staff must understand the need to report data breaches even those in which they were responsible, so the breach can be mitigated or otherwise responded. The Australian Government StaySmartOnline Site for Businesses referred to above provides very useful guidance in to address the vulnerabilities and could become the basis of a legal practices security policy.

A sample Information Security Policy, prepared primarily from the above site could be:

Information Security Policy



Awareness by all Staff and Enforcement

Information Security is a basic obligation of all employees and practitioners. This policy specifies procedures and rules that must be followed to ensure that the information retained by the firm is secure from loss and intrusion or disclosure.

This firm holds information which if lost could be catastrophic for the firm, and also sensitive and commercial valuable information belonging to clients who lost of disclosure could cause substantial loss and damage.

A wilful breach of the policies will lead to disciplinary action.

Social Engineering challenges

Staff must know social engineering attempts for external parties to obtain the disclosure of information. It is the practice of misleading and misdirecting a person in such a way as to attain information through social interaction. The hallmark of a successful social engineer is that they receive the information they request without raising any suspicion.

Employees should not to give information over the phone or email without identifying the requestor.

All requests for information should be funnelled through a partner or solicitor who can verify the authenticity of the caller.

Office Security

The Office should not remain unattended during office hours.

Surveillance

Closed Circuit Television Cameras should be installed in the reception area and in areas where sensitive information is stored.

Pass Cards

Pass Cards are issued to each employee individually. They provide a record of when that employee enters premises out of hours.

Pass Cards should not be shared with other employees except for special circumstances and for limited periods.

Pass cards should not be copied or duplicated.

If a Pass Card is lost or stolen, the employee must immediately notify a partner.

Pass Cards must be returned on the employee leaving the practice.

Keys

Keys be kept safe at all time.

No address or other information identifying the firm or the employee should be attached to the key.

A lost key service identification may be attached to the key.

Employees must have no keys issued to them copied.

If a key is lost, its loss may be reported immediately to the office management

Keys must be returned on the employee leaving the practice.

Alarm Pins (Personal Identification Numbers)

Individual and distinct Alarm Pins to employees who need access out of hours.

Those employees should keep their PIN confidential and not shared with other employees.

Once an employee leaves, that employee’s PIN should not be recycled, but removed from the pool of available PIN numbers.

Computer Equipment, Printers and Facsimile Machines

Computers, Printers and Facsimile Machines may contain confidential information. All confidential information must be scrubbed before disposing of the machine. Including the removal of any hard disk in printers or facsimile machines.

Mobile Device Security

Mobile Devices may contain confidential information. All phones should be registered so they can be GPS located, or remotely swiped in the worst case.

All remote devices must only be accessed by a PIN code.

Any loss should be immediately reported.

Employee Errors

It is recognised that staff may make mistakes resulting in the loss or disclosure of information. Those mistakes may result from mistakenly sending and email or facsimile to the wrong recipient misaddressing a letter, or inadvertently including in a correspondence material that should not have been sent.

If a mistake is recognised immediately after it has occurred, attempts should be made to immediately retrieve the material. Where the incorrect recipient is another legal practitioner, this may only require a telephone call to the wrong recipient requesting recipient permanently delete the incorrect addressed email or destroy the incorrectly addressed facsimile. In other cases a formal letter may be required, and a report made to a partner.

With incorrectly addressed mail attempts should be made to have the material returned.

Email

In the case of email, practitioners should be wary of using Blind Copy (BCC). This is often very convenient, to send to a client communication between the legal practitioner and the opposing client. Problems can arise when the client mistakenly sends a reply “to all” with confidential instructions.

Firewalls, Antivirus and Spam Filters

The legal practice with advice from the Information Technology advisers:

install appropriate fire walls, antivirus and spam filters;

Install monitor and reporting software to ensure the adequacy of the cyber security software.

Monitoring

The Legal Practice with the assistance of its IT advisors must ensure that All firewalls and other security measures are continually monitored for effectiveness and to identify attempted attacks and data breaches.

Passwords

All employees should maintain strong passwords.

All employees must not use the same password to access other websites or cloud services.

StaySmartOnline.gov.au makes the following recommendations



A strong password has the following attributes:

a minimum length of eight (8) characters; and

a mix of upper and lower case letters; and

at least one numeral; and

at least one non-alphanumeric character; and

does not include a dictionary word in any language



The password does not literally have to be a single word. To make a password easy to remember, think of a pass phrase and then change some of the characters to make it a strong password:



June School Holidays can be modified to: 7un3Schoo1Ho!id@ys



Some where over the rainbow, blue birds fly can be modified to 5w0tR,Bbf}



I like Australian red wine can be modified to: IL077ieR3dw!ne*



Be good, be wise can be modified to: B3g00db3wi5e$



Please don’t use these examples.



Remote Access

Employees who have remote access to the legal practices computer system should have very strong passwords of at least 9 characters.

The Practice should give consideration when appropriate to Dual Token based Authentication flor remote access. Whilst this may previously be considered to be too inconvenient, Microsoft Windows 8 Operating System with the appropriate hardware (such as the Surface RT and Surface Pro) allow for virtual token based authentication.

Cloud Services

The practice must confirm that the information security policies of any cloud based services exceed this policy.

Website Access

The legal practice should prevent access to inappropriate web sites.

Portable Media

Employees may only copy material to portable media (USB Drives, CDROMs) for limited purposes.

The Legal Practice with the assistance of its IT advisors should maintain monitoring and reporting systems to report unusual copying of files.

Operating System Updates

The Legal Practice with the assistance of its IT advisors must ensure that all operating and security software updates are routinely installed.

Backup

The Legal Practice with the assistance of its IT advisors must ensure adequate back procedures are in place. Including having off site back up that is securely stored.

The Legal Practice should consider multiple backup of essential information including on line remote back up of practice management information.

Response Plans

The legal practice shall have I place plans for the recovery of the data if a loss has occurred. .

If confidential information has been lost, affected clients and authorities must be notified immediately.

Revise

The Legal practice must review this policy annually.



JDC 26 February 2013

Updated 21 March 2013 and 31 March 2013