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.