In 2009, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) first warned that law firms were the targets of hackers. The agency repeated the warning in 2013 with the special agent in charge of cyber and special operations for the FBI’s New York Office saying, “We have hundreds of law firms that we see increasingly being targeted by hackers.”
This should not come as a surprise. Law firms have a wide range of types of valuable information from the identities of targets of takeovers to corporate financial information to trade secrets to embarrassing details of the lives of client. There is a ready and eager market for this information, and it easily can end up in the hands of unscrupulous opposing counsel, business competitors or a foreign competitor.
