“We have stopped 7,000 e-mail viruses this month.” This is par for the course nowadays for a large or medium-sized law firm. “Of the 150,000 e-mails we receive each month, about one in four is spam.” This, again, seems to be pretty normal. One large law firm had to act quickly last month to counter complaints from staff that exposure to pornographic junk mail attachments was infringing their human rights. Yet again, this is hardly big news these days. Spam, viruses and content filtering are among the most pressing security and risk management issues faced by law firms at the moment, according to a straw poll conducted by Legal Week‘s sister paper Legal IT in May.
Viruses can be spread in lots of different ways, but e-mail is by far the most popular method of transmission – perhaps because Microsoft Outlook is such a brilliant replication engine. Most people who use computers at work should, by now, have a reasonable awareness of e-mail viruses and should know better than to double-click on the misspelled name of an unexpected attachment. But as awareness grows, so does the sophistication of the viruses. “Everyone knows how dangerous virus infection is, but I doubt it features high on their list of concerns,” one IT director says. “Until it happens, and they have caused it.”
