Multi-Law Firm Security Breach

This week the Wall Street Journal reported that hackers had broken into the computer networks at 2 dozen leading U.S. law firms. According to the story federal investigators are now trying to identify what data was stolen and whether or not any of that data was used to front-run trades. Even though these firms were alerted in recent months, these breaches occurred last summer. We are sending this advisory out to all of our customers as recently we have had questions forwarded to us from customers outside of the legal space on behalf of their General Counsel.

What we know:

If you’re a client of ours, you know that you haven’t been identified through the Wall Street Journal article. You’ll also know (through the alerts from our Security Operations Center) that increasingly, phishing and brute force attacks have occurred against your organization.

In addition to the Active Threat Protection systems and methodologies we employ onsite to help keep our clients safe, we use our own Threat Aggregator – known as Cymon (Cyber Monitor). It’s accessible at https://cymon.io for security researchers.

This data collection system we've created queries 200-some sources of data for information security purposes. It contains 6+ million unique IP addresses with 20,000 IPs added daily. We believe that it is the largest open threat intelligence community available. 

As a method to watch for our client data (including employee email addresses) and/or reputational details, we watch for instances of our current client domains to show up. If a new instance of client information (keyed through the domain) is discovered, our Security Operations Center will alert you through the regular alert channels. 

It does not appear that any of our clients have been affected by this campaign. 

We did scour Cymon to look for those firms identified within the WSJ article. Initial findings demonstrate that employee credentials and password hashes from many of the listed firms are available through mass data sites (such as Pastebin) obtained from exploited third-party sources and websites. This data is an indicator that if nothing else, these firms are at risk for phishing campaigns and targeted attacks. 

Indicators of Compromise have not been made available for these attacks.

When we analyze attacks against our client base (in the legal vertical), we find that the attackers typically use “throw-away” IP addresses to hide their true location.

eSentire’s Active Threat Protection methodologies will continue to adapt to the changing threat environment and help defend against the mutating attacks to your organizations. It is critical that your employees receive ongoing education to help enlist them in this fight so that they do not find themselves enlisted as a vector of a successful attack.

Resources:

Multi-Law Firm Security Breach Amplifies Industry Vulnerability (Blog)