We recently attended the excellent Legal Geek conference, which had some great panels and discussions around Lawtech. One brilliant talk we attended was from Rhodri Thomas & Sunil Singh of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, and focused on “Insights from handling global cyber cases” – detailing how to deal with cybercrime.

They discussed the state of cybercrime and its impacts on the legal profession, as well as looking to the future, and what firms can do to prevent and react to such events.

Here’s a brief overview of what was discussed:

• Ransomware – It is still one of the most prevalent types of cybercrime. There is an increasing human element and sophistication to the types of attacks they are seeing. One preventative measure is to always check the person asking something of you is who they say they are. Other recommendations include having an incident response plan & keeping a detailed audit trail of any remediation you may undertake.
• Multi-jurisdiction attacks – What should businesses be aware of when subjugated to a multi-jurisdiction attack? Get everyone told in a good timeframe, unless it’s a massive issue (e.g. 30+ authorities need to be informed) and you won’t make the deadline. In that case, think strategically about which jurisdiction will have the biggest impact and prioritise them first.
• Cryptocurrencies – Still a big part of many claims, but make it incredibly difficult to recoup funds and go after the hacker when they are ultimately super-anonymised, even with their transaction visible on the blockchain. In situations like that, firms will go after ‘persons unknown’ if possible, or contact parties that may be involved, e.g. the website hosts of where stolen data is hosted, etc.