Pop quiz. How many of the following items are you familiar with?
- Back door/trap door
- Cracks
- DNS poisoning
- Eavesdropping
- Hackers
- IP spoofing
- Malware
- Man-in-the-middle spoofing
- Network sniffing
- Password cracking
- Phishing
- Ransomware
- Replay attacks
- Social engineering
- Spam
- Spyware
- System penetration
- System tampering
- TCP/IP hijacking
- Trojan
- Tunneling
- Viruses
- Website defacement
- Worms
When lecturing about or assisting law firms with cybersecurity issues, I ask them to tell me what each of these items is, and not surprisingly, no one has ever gotten a perfect score. In fact, no one has ever come close to receiving a passing grade. Of course not, lawyers aren’t trained to be cybersecurity experts. Yet cybersecurity—which is the process of protecting a computer or computer network against the criminal or unauthorized use of electronic data—is something every law firm needs to know about and to protect against.