Security Awareness Training for Legal Professionals

Every employee at a law firm is a good target for cyber-attackers. To avoid being the next victim of a data breach, these employees need security awareness training. Security awareness training educates employees to recognize phishing emails, social engineering tactics, suspicious web content, physical threats, and the psychological tactics that attackers use to steal data. Recent data breaches often begin with a phishing email or a social engineering event, so employees need to recognize the signs. 

Effective security awareness training should be integrated into current security policies, and all employees, including executives, contractors, temporary workers, and remote staff, should be required to undergo training. Any user with access to sensitive information should be aware of the signs of phishing emails or social engineering attacks. For some law firms, security awareness training may be required for compliance, depending on the type of data stored on the firm’s network. 

TitanHQ offers security awareness training to help legal professionals understand the importance of data breaches, the ethics behind cybersecurity data protection, and the steps to take if they’re the target of a cyber attack. By educating employees, a law firm can significantly reduce its risk of a data breach and save millions in potential lawsuits, litigation, and reputation damage. 

Protecting Your Data by Empowering Your Employees 

Most people think of hackers as elite professionals who break into digital systems from their home computers. Still, many of the most significant data breaches begin with a phishing email or social engineering attack. Contrary to this common way of thinking, it’s employees who give access to attackers either through downloading malware, disclosing sensitive information, or sending money to an attacker's account.  

Some phishing email messages contain fake invoices that prompt the recipient to send money to the attacker’s bank account. With any of these attacks, the message often includes a social engineering component. Social engineering shares elements with phishing, but it’s much more personal and targeted. With social engineering, an attacker might pretend to be a colleague or work for the target’s boss. Typically, social engineering involves a sense of urgency related to the target’s job. 

A current popular social engineering attack uses hacked accounts to message an employee with a request for gift cards for their boss. Attackers claim to be the target’s boss or an associate, and gift cards are necessary to pay someone or give them gifts during a conference or other type of event. Usually, the attacker has access to the owner’s account, so it’s much more believable. Again, the attacker conveys a sense of urgency, tricking the target into buying the cards and supplying them to the attacker. 

You might wonder how this affects the legal industry, but effective methods are cloned and templated for other targets. An attacker might use the same method but have different goals in mind. For sophisticated attacks, an attacker would conduct research into the business, become familiar with key executives, and understand how the company operates. Having this sort of knowledge elicits even more trust from a target. 

According to a NIST survey, 72% of participants reported that simulated phishing exercises with click-through rates helped them assess the effectiveness of their security awareness training efforts. Training must provide technical information to users, but it should also be understood that legal professionals are not necessarily knowledgeable about how cyber-attackers perform data breaches. The constant feedback enables organizations to tailor their training modules to specific departments and users who may require additional support. 

It is worth noting that individuals who are knowledgeable about cyberattacks can also be vulnerable to phishing and social engineering. System administrators are privileged targets, and large-scale data breaches have occurred through spear phishing of system administrators. A notable example is the 2014 Sony Pictures hack, in which internal email messages were stolen and subsequently published. The attack was a spear phishing campaign targeting all Sony system administrators. One administrator fell for the attack and provided their system credentials. From there, attackers accessed Sony’s network environment and stole unreleased files, employee data, internal emails, and financial information. 

How Can Law Firms Deploy Security Training 

Simulation emails and security awareness training should be left to those who are familiar with common trends in phishing and social engineering. You want a system that emulates real-world situations as closely as possible, so users receive the best training when they encounter a true attack in their inbox. 

Security awareness training is supplemental, so law firms should also have phishing filters, web content filters, and spam filters installed on their infrastructure. These systems block malicious emails from reaching their intended recipients so that users never see the messages. Should a phishing attack bypass filters, security awareness training serves as an additional layer of protection. Users should then be instructed to report the message to security staff or your managed service provider so that filters can be further configured to catch any false negatives. 

By implementing a security awareness training solution like TitanHQ SAT, your law firm significantly reduces the risk of becoming the next victim of a data breach resulting from phishing and social engineering cyberattacks. 

Sign up for a free demo to see the TitanHQ security awareness training and phishing simulation solution in action.