![]() It is not difficult to pick up a laptop or even a desktop computer and walk out of an office with it. Unfortunately, every storage device is portable so only focusing on the smallest, most portable means missing other, potentially more damaging, risks. You might be inclined to only encrypt these portable drives. It’s a reputational hit that can damage your clients’ trust in you. Imagine yourself in that position, having to notify all of your clients about the loss of their information. It only takes a quick Web search of “ unencrypted usb” to turn up hundreds of stories of USB drives that were unencrypted, lost, and potentially exposed thousands of peoples’ personal information. In other words, if you have any portable drive to which you save your law practice information, it should be encrypted too. ![]() These standalone encryption tools can also be used for external hard drives and USB thumb or flash drives. This is trickier – you have to make sure confidential and private information is not stored outside of your encrypted container – and is more hassle than it’s worth unless you have a special reason to do it. You can also use them to encrypt just part of your disk drive, where your confidential information is stored. You can use these instead of Bitlocker or FileVault to encrypt your entire hard disk. There are third-party encryption tools as well. Apple iPhones are encrypted by default but you need to use a PIN or password to secure the device. This is the way Windows Bitlocker and Macintosh FileVault 2 work they are included in the operating system but have to be turned on. Recent Android-powered devices have encryption built into the operating system but not turned on by default. You set the encryption and, except for using a password to turn off the encryption, and turning it on again when you shut down your system, you can forget about it. When you have applied encryption to the device, it is a matter of “set and forget”. I do not need to be able to use Windows to copy files and other data off your hard drive.Įncryption is a complex security technology. If we return to the box, a Windows password leaves your hard drive outside the secured box. But that only secures access to the operating system and the applications in it. Some lawyers think that they have secured their files by using a Windows password. When your whole hard drive is in the box, then nothing – from your Windows wallpaper to your client files – can be accessed without the decryption password. If you think of encryption as a box into which you’ve put your data, then you can visualize how, when the box is closed, no-one can see what is in the box. In fact, Windows is a great example of how the encryption works. This is different from your operating system password in Microsoft Windows. In practice, you type in a password on your smartphone or tablet or on your computer when it starts up. While it is decrypted, anyone can access it on the device. For you or anyone else to access the data, a password is needed to decrypt the data. When the encryption is turned on, it hides your data within whatever container is encrypted. That may seem counter intuitive if you do not understand how encryption works. Both provide full disk encryption so that as soon as you turn off your computer, you are protected. Now you just purchase a business version of Windows with its BitLocker encryption built in and turn it on. It was once tricky to encrypt a Windows computer or a smartphone but that has changed in the last few years. EncryptionĪny device containing client information should be encrypted. It revolves around just a few basic functions that need to be used properly and consistently. There’s nothing magical about law practice security. A criminal may not be able to breach a corporation’s security, but they may be able to get through a law firm’s and get access to the same information. It is one reason that law firms have been called the soft underbelly of cyber security. One big difference is that they tend to hold valuable information on the part of other people. The legal profession is largely solo and small law firms and face the same challenges that other small businesses do. Before we talk about more of the technology in a law practice, let’s look at how you start to secure the information you are gathering.
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