The threat landscape is evolving

– are you?

Article

Publish Date:

24 June 2024

As we continue through 2024 and beyond, the legal sector, like all businesses faces an increasingly complex landscape of security challenges. Unlike some businesses, law firms are custodians of highly sensitive client data.

They must ensure their security policies and controls address the challenges of 2024 and beyond while adapting to significant changes in working practices. With a dispersed global workforce consuming data in various ways, robust security measures are essential.

Two main changes

Many business networks are now borderless, employees work from home, holiday homes, foreign countries or whilst travelling.

The devices they use may be company-issued or they may be personally provided. Legacy security techniques such as corporate firewalls in offices or AV on the endpoint do not deliver the data protection businesses now need.

Combine this with the fact that most companies now operate a multi-cloud vendor model for services like case management systems, payroll, and Microsoft 365. Data locations are more disparate than ever, yet all need to be secured.

Key security challenges

The usual security challenges remain prevalent: ransomware, phishing and social engineering, insider threats (both intentional and unintentional), and third-party supply chain risks. These threats still need to be combated as the methods around these exploits mature to be more sophisticated.

Additionally new technology threats now also require defending against, such as API vulnerabilities, secrets management for app-to-app security, IoT exploits and obviously AI technologies designed to automate and streamline business processes, which bring a plethora of their own security challenges.

Often legacy security technology vendors cannot adapt existing products or develop new solutions quickly enough to comprehensively defend against these new threats or products against the new techniques used to exploit the more legacy type of threats.

Businesses need to adapt and mature their security policies, user education, and security controls.

New generation vendors offering market-leading Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platforms, developed in the cloud to protect the hybrid cloud, provide the best protection to businesses in today’s multi-cloud vendor world. Information security and acceptable use policies from only a few years ago likely do not cover your business’s new working practices and will need to be updated and recommunicated.

User cyber security education is essential. Employees now must be aware of social engineering scams and advanced phishing attacks, ensure their machines are rebooted to apply security patches preventing CVE exploits and remain productive in their daily tasks. A little education can go a long way.

Despite the new challenges, legacy controls still play a crucial role in protecting on-premises systems. The guardians who manage all of this for your business are constantly under pressure to prevent exploits.

The reality is that breaches will occur at some point; the focus should be on limiting their impact, containing their spread, and responding quickly.

Key tools to assist:

Market leading:

Manage Detection & Response (MDR) services

Play a huge role in helping the security teams within your business spot the “needle in the haystack” quickly. This either prevents an exploit or allows you to react to it in real time limiting its impact. Learn more on our Arctic Wolf page.

Next-Generation Antivirus and threat prevention solutions (NGAV)

Leverage AI and latest techniques to prevent new forms of attacks. Some businesses might need to change their current antivirus vendor to find a product that offers true next-generation protection, but this technology will be fairly familiar to most businesses.

SASE solutions integrate key modern security controls

Such as Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), Next-Gen Firewalls/Web Application Firewalls, and SD-WAN into a single management platform, offering granular policy controls across all aspects of the solution. This is a newer aspect of security control for most businesses, but it is now necessary to secure business data based on the access methods and locations employees use. For instance, can you control how and where employees use cloud storage? For example, can you restrict downloads from a corporate OneDrive account to non-company devices whilst allowing them on company devices, as long as they are in the UK?

Another crucial protective solution:

Secrets and password management is another crucial protective solution many businesses are considering enhancing application-to-application integrated security.

As you can see, usage, threats, and protection techniques have evolved. We all have a responsibility to adapt in order to safeguard our businesses against these new threats.

For more on the current threat landscape and need for recovery plans, read more here.