OTB Consulting

  • Home
  • About OTB
    • Our Story
    • Team OTB
    • Awards
  • Services
    • Technology Guidance
    • Software Implementation
    • Training
  • Solutions
    • Practice Management
    • Document & Email Management
    • Time, Billing & Accounting
  • Products
    • Practice Management
      • Time Matters / Billing Matters
      • Tabs3 / PracticeMaster
      • Actionstep
      • Centerbase
      • Clio
      • BKexpress
    • Document & Email Management
      • NetDocuments
    • Time & Billing
      • PCLaw
      • Tabs3
      • Actionstep
      • Centerbase
    • Office 365
    • Consumer Bankruptcy
      • BKexpress
      • BKexpress Cloud
      • BKeTouch
      • BKecf
    • Practice Area Templates
      • U.S. Litigation Packs
      • Time Matters Litigation Pack
      • Insurance Defense
    • TM Touch
    • TM Tools
  • Resources
    • Downloads
    • OTB Technical Support
  • Contact Us
  • Blog
You are here: Home / Data Backup & Restore / Ransomware Heads Up

May 12, 2020 By Tom Rowe Leave a Comment

Ransomware Heads Up

I recently read an article by Sharon Nelson and John Simek, of Sensei Enterprises, Inc. Sharon and John are well known legal technology security experts. When Sharon and John say, “[in] light of the new threats, we believe law firms need to take ransomware much more seriously than they have in the past,” I believe them. You can read their article here.

We do not handle law firms’ firewalls, anti-virus, or backups. That isn’t our business. But, every law firm we work has to deal with all of the issues that affect the security of their data. Over the past 5 years, we’ve had at least a dozen, likely more, firms who have been hit by ransomware and have had to recover. Here are some of our observations:

  • Those that had virtualized servers (VM), which were backed up at least once a day, had the easiest times recovering. Simply strip the servers down to bare metal, and then reinstall the VMs. Most of those firms were up and running within a day, some within a few hours. If you aren’t setup using virtual servers, you should be. Contact your IT company and see what it would take to make this happen. If you are going to upgrade servers in the future, insist on VMs.
  • Those that had non-VM backups eventually recovered most of their data, but it took a lot longer, most often weeks instead of hours or days.
  • Those that didn’t have backups had to chose to pay the ransom. Both firms were successful in getting the documents back. One paid several thousand dollars, the other around $7,000. Payment was made in Bitcoin which took a while to obtain.
  • We had at least one client that lost all their data as they didn’t have a backup.

One option firms have to avoid ransomware is to host their data in the cloud. This can be done using SaaS applications like NetDocuments, Centerbase, Actionstep, Soluno, etc. Or you can use “desktop as a service” or DaaS providers, where premise-based software like Time Matters, PCLaw, and the like, are hosted in the Cloud and each user accesses a desktop environment to use the programs.

With respect to DaaS and ransomware, one purported advantage of this type of environment is that they handle all the security. Yet, we have had at least 3 firms using DaaS get hit by ransomware. 2 were down at least a week as the company restored the data, and the other never got their data back. Yeah, it was as terrible as it sounds.

The lesson for firms using DaaS or SaaS is that if you have data in the cloud, you should make sure it is safe and have some redundancy setup. For example, NetDocuments provides a service call ndMirror where all document are mirrored to a local drive. Actionstep provides a periodic SQL data dump to a local server. Time Matters users can set up SQLBackupAndFTP, an inexpensive program that easily backs up the Time Matters SQL database to a Dropbox or other Cloud repository. Anyone running SQLBackupAndFTP could have their Time Matters up and running within a day, if not within a few hours. We wrote an article about it a while ago.

Filed Under: Data Backup & Restore, SaaS, Uncategorized Tagged With: DaaS, ransomware, SaaS

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Blog Categories

  • Announcements (2)
  • Awards (7)
  • Consumer Bankruptcy (3)
  • Data Backup & Restore (2)
  • Document Management Software (9)
    • NetDocuments (8)
  • Email Management (7)
    • NetDocuments (5)
  • Metrics (1)
  • News (2)
  • Paperless Office (1)
  • Practice Management Software (16)
    • ActionStep (3)
    • Time Matters (7)
  • Reporting (1)
  • SaaS (2)
  • Scanning (1)
  • Social Media (2)
    • Twitter (2)
  • SQL (1)
  • Time & Billing (1)
  • Uncategorized (2)
  • Windows 10 (2)

Blog Post Tags

ActionStep Analytics BKexpress Clio DaaS Document Management Email Overload Metrics MyCase ndOffice ransomware Reporting SaaS SimplyFile Time & Billing Time Matters

Blog Archives

  • November 2020 (1)
  • July 2020 (1)
  • May 2020 (1)
  • October 2017 (1)
  • April 2017 (1)
  • March 2017 (2)
  • January 2017 (1)
  • August 2016 (2)
  • April 2016 (1)
  • January 2016 (1)
  • August 2015 (1)
  • July 2015 (2)
  • June 2015 (1)
  • May 2015 (3)
  • April 2015 (4)
  • March 2015 (5)
  • February 2015 (1)
  • June 2014 (1)
  • March 2014 (1)
  • October 2013 (1)
  • January 2013 (1)
  • December 2012 (1)
  • September 2010 (1)
  • October 2009 (1)
  • June 2005 (1)
  • June 2004 (1)

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Get social … follow & like us!

Facebook
Twitter
Visit Us
Follow Me

Login

Resources

  • Tips & Hints
  • Videos
    • NetDocuments UI Changes Videos
  • Webinars

Contact Us

  • OTB Consulting
  • 166 Quade Drive
    Cary, North Carolina 27513
    USA
  • 919-677-1415
  • info@otb-consulting.com
  • Download vCard

Copyright © 2023 · All rights reserved - Out of the Box Developers, LLC · Log in