The most widely read magazine for Canadian lawyers
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2008 CANADIAN LAWYER LEGAL SOFTWARE SURVEY The price of security is eternal vigilance BY IAN HARVEY Protecting information extends beyond the useable life cycle of electronics, and even discarded machines need to be properly disposed of. I t seems innocent enough. A lawyer slips into a coffee shop with her lap- top, logs onto a wireless network, and dashes off a few e-mails before a case conference, stopping long enough to go to the counter and pay for her latte when it's ready. Yet it's a scenario which makes infor- mation technology managers cringe. The reality of the digital age is that dan- ger lurks everywhere: the Wi-Fi service she logged on to could be compromised or be a "look-alike" — set up by a hacker to intercept information or, worse, gain unauthorized access to her laptop's hard drive. And leaving the laptop on the ta- ble while she collected her coffee was an invitation to steal it. The price of security is eternal vigi- lance, as the Canadian Bar Association discovered over the 2007 holiday period. Returning to its Ottawa offices on Jan. 2, a routine system-security audit dis- covered someone had hacked into their system and accessed some 800 names of Ontario lawyers, their business address- es, phone numbers, and credit cards numbers — though the latter were high- ly encrypted and unlikely to be cracked. 32 APRIL 2008 www. C ANADIAN mag.com "It was an interesting experience and we leaned a lot," says CEO John Hoyles. "We took 48 hours to assess what had happened and then by e-mail and mail notified some 639 members after we au- dited the data file to eliminate duplica- tions. We felt we had to act in the most transparent way possible." Even when desktop, laptops, servers, and backup tape drives reach the end of their life cycle, there is still some stew- ardship required. "Even if you delete files from a hard drive, they're still there," says Joseph Bozic, president of DataXile Corp., a Toronto company that provides mobile data destruction services to all business sectors, including legal. "Mostly we get called in when firms are replacing their hardware. There's a diminishing re- turn in trying to recycle hard drives; one, because they're cheaper to buy in a PC bundle installed; and two, after so many years they're more likely to fail and cause more problems with your new data." His service degausses hard drives — in effect wiping them with a magnetic field — then drills a hole though the case and platter. "There's a peace of mind when you drill it in front of the client," he