The COVID-19 outbreak is forcing lawyers to work at home, and the threat of being “hacked” at home, where the regimen of a law firm’s policies and costly IT infrastructure do not exist, remains even greater than at the office. The fact is that attorneys have an ethical obligation to protect law firm and client confidences, and doing so when working remotely is not so easy. The virus outbreak has exposed chinks in the amour of the confident legal profession where vulnerabilities exist.
Lawyers cannot let their guard down when they are using the shared family laptop while working from home in sweats. This is just what the “bad guys” are relying upon when they seek to “hack” into your unsecure home system or compromise your Gmail account or “phish” you with malignant links enticing you to click on them to find out the current status of court closings or the spread of the virus in your neighborhood.
