Hackers steal personal data of Google employees after breaching US law firm

By Jay Jay for teiss
Tuesday, October 27, 2020

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Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy LLP, a law firm that offers employment verification compliance services to Google in the United States, suffered unauthorised access into its computer systems in September that resulted in hackers accessing the personal information of present and former Google employees.

According to Ilia Kolochenko, Founder & CEO of ImmuniWeb, the fact that hackers targeted a law firm that stores a large amount of data associated with present and former Google employees is not surprising as law firms possess a great wealth of the most confidential and sensitive data of their wealthy or politically-exposed clients, and habitually cannot afford the same state-of-the-art level of cybersecurity as the original data owners.

"Frequently, large law firms become cybercrime victims because of breached suppliers that have privileged access to their networks – not that infrequent without any control or monitoring of such access. Ransomware attacks, crushing IT operations of the large law firms, is just the tip of a formidable hacking iceberg.

"The most sophisticated attackers virtually never leave any noticeable trace and do their best to conceal the very fact of intrusion. We should consider developing a national security standard, imposing strict data protection rules on law firms of a certain size. Otherwise, most of the enacted cybersecurity regulations, covering large clients of law firms, eventually become futile and ineffective," he added.

In May this year, a hacker group used the feared REvil ransomware to infiltrate the network of media and entertainment law firm Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks and steal up to 756GB of data including contracts, nondisclosure agreements, phone numbers, email addresses, music rights, and personal correspondence of a large number of well-known American celebrities. Read Full Article