Chicago-based law firm ‘Seyfarth Shaw’ has been hit by a cyberattack last week and highly placed sources say that the attack is of ransomware genre and has disrupted most of the critical servers affecting the remote work of over 900 company attorneys working across the world.
This malicious Cybersecurity incident is yet to be made official and sources say that the law firm is not in a position to bow to the ransom demands of hackers as it has an excellent data recovery plan in place.
On October 10th, 2020 Seyfarth Shaw posted on its website that a sophisticated malware attack has disrupted its servers after unauthorized access was detected the previous day.
As law firms have to follow a basic business principle of maintaining their client data on a confidential note, any data spill from data breaches or ransomware attacks could put an end to their entire business within no time.
However, Seyfarth Shaw is hopeful that its proactive Cybersecurity measures will help in thwarting the ransomware attack with ease.
Meanwhile, CyberEdge’s 2020 Cyberthreat Defense Report states that over 69% of companies in North America and 61% in Latin America were hit by ransomware attacks so far in 2020 making them stand at the number one and two positions in the chart followed by Africa and middle east reporting 59% of attacks and Europe standing 4th with 57% and Asia at 5th position with 55% attacks.
Keeping aside other countries and taking into account only the industries operating in North America 15.4% of firms belonging to the government, and 13.9% related to manufacturing were reported to be severely hit by the file-encrypting attack this year.
CyberEdge is predicting that by the year 2021, a ransomware attack is expected to hit a target by every 11 seconds, stealing data and holding it encrypted till a ransom is paid.
