Law firms keep sensitive client data secure with CloudMask
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Cloudmask offers a secure solution for law firms using cloud services to manage sensitive client data, addressing security vulnerabilities associated with traditional SaaS applications. By utilizing a browser extension that masks sensitive data before transmission and ensures that only authorized users can access unmasked information, Cloudmask mitigates risks of data breaches, including those from insiders and malicious external actors. The solution enables smaller firms to adopt robust cybersecurity measures without requiring extensive IT resources, distinguishing itself with common criteria certification for data masking capabilities.
Law firms keep sensitive client data secure with CloudMask
- 1. CloudMask thinks differently in the secure-cloud landscape. Law firms keep sensitive client data secure with CloudMask. The economic value proposition of Software as a Service (SaaS) is undeniable. SaaS is disrupting industry after industry, making accessible to sole proprietors and small businesses software functionality that historically required significant investment in hardware, software, and annual maintenance fees. This, in turn, is making smaller players even more agile and efficient than they used to be, allowing them to run competitive circles around larger or laggard players. The good news is that rich software functionality is often available for less than $100 per month, enabling high levels of business management and administrative efficiencies. The bad news is that the tempting sky of cloud and SaaS computing is filled with thunderclouds of cybersecurity concerns. Despite the best efforts of traditional cybersecurity experts, the adoption of cloud computing has been accompanied by an ever-growing number of egregious data breaches. These breaches damage brands and drive up significant costs for investigations, notification, and identity-theft protection for clients whose personal information has drifted into malicious hands. So, what’s going on? Why do even the largest enterprises struggle with securing their data? Wouldn’t the National Security Agency be one of the most rigorous security practitioners in the world? What leaks have we not yet detected? One thought leader at a major global cybersecurity consultancy explained it like this: “We’re trying to examine every packet that flows across the perimeter of the network and notice IP addresses that don’t make sense. This is incredibly hard. There’s a ridiculous amount of data, and we’ve entered an age where the network no longer has clear boundaries. We really haven’t solved that problem.” The problem lies in the way traditional security thinkers have defined the problem. They’re working with a castle-and moat metaphor, where the internal network is protected with a set of security rings. Each ring, however, has costly hardware and software searching for malevolent inbound and outbound data. But it’s like looking for needles in a haystack. And even if security experts are successful at protecting the perimeter, there is little protection against insiders (employees or others with access to the internal network). Law firms keep sensitive client data secure with CloudMask
- 2. CloudMask for the legal profession Increasingly, small and medium-sized law firms are adopting a variety of cloud services to raise their level of service and reduce the costs of management. Lawyers are also finding themselves communicating with clients via email, both for basic conversations and document-sharing. Lawyers have a duty of confidentiality to their clients. Whether using practice management software as a service, communicating with clients using free webmail, or leveraging file-sharing services, the lawyer has a duty to minimize the risks of unauthorized individuals intercepting and viewing confidential information. Success or failure in data protection can mean the difference between winning and losing a case. Cloud service providers generally have security stories that provide comfort to non-cyber professionals. These often include claims around “bank-grade” or “military-grade” encryption, which refers to the protection of data as it travels from the client network to the cloud provider’s network. But what’s often left unstated is the fact that cloud vendors either store sensitive data in unencrypted form or encrypt the data with a method that requires the cloud vendor to have a cryptographic key. Both present strong vulnerabilities and risks to privacy and confidentiality. Many attorneys who have adopted practice management software continue to be concerned about data protection. While such applications’ security design reflects best-industry practices, the traditional security industry continues to be sabotaged by hackers. Massive data breaches of sensitive personal data violate privacy, damage business brands, and incur significant remediation costs. With CloudMask, legal practice management software users can ensure that sensitive data remains protected in the event of system breaches, and therefore prevent triggering costly notification and identity theft processes called for by data protection regulations. CloudMask’s approach ensures that only authorized individuals have keys to decrypt sensitive data. This means that once data is masked, none of the third parties processing the data can ever see that data in the clear. Data is protected from the moment of its creation to the moment it arrives on an authorized user’s device. Clio is the first legal practice management software to facilitate CloudMask integration, allowing clients to protect sensitive data and use the cloud with confidence. CloudMask Clio can be combined with Gmail and Google Drive, ensuring that both legal practice management data and communications occur under total end-to-end encryption. CloudMask thinks differently. We see the problem in simpler terms: protecting sensitive data and ensuring that only authorized users, using known devices, can see data in the clear. We’re happy to let the traditional security experts work on their perimeters, knowing that when they fail, our customers’ data remains secure. And, in contrast with products designed for big enterprises, we’ve created a solution that can be installed, configured, and afforded by small businesses without IT staff. The SaaS Security Problem – Simplified SaaS applications use best-practice security protocols and rely on their cloud provider to secure the infrastructure the application runs on. One vendor explains it this way: “We ensure that your communications are secure using bank-grade 256-bit SSL encryption. All of (our) infrastructure is hosted using physically secure, managed data centers that meet the rigid SSAE 16 specifications. Geo-redundant backups are performed multiple times per day, and site security and privacy are routinely audited by respected third parties.” By means of 256-bit SSL encryption, the connection between your browser or app and database servers is secured. When you submit a query or update, the data is encrypted as it transits the internet. Once the data reaches the data center, it is decrypted for insertion into the app’s database. The data center itself (e.g., Amazon Web Services) has a rigorous set of security controls and protocols, meaning that only employees with the proper identification and access passwords can physically or virtually access the servers that hold the application’s data. SSAE 16 is a standard according to which data centers are audited for their degree of compliance with policy.
- 3. There are three vulnerabilities that should concern executives: 1. Anyone who tricks a user into revealing their username and password can impersonate that user and log in from any browser in the world. Such a hacker can impersonate the user and perform administrator functions. You don’t have to be a fool to have this happen to you. Even a sophisticated user like CIA Director John Brennan has fallen prey to high school-age hackers. 2. Any insider (employee of the data center) can turn from “good” to “bad” overnight or have their credentials stolen, meaning that an authorized system administrator could access application data for malevolent purposes. Insiders don’t need to be “bad” to present a threat. They can simply be careless. A recent report on cybersecurity suggests that less than 50 percent of organizations have adequate policies in place to mitigate insider-threat risks. The challenge here is that executives depend on their SaaS provider, who in turn rely on their cloud service providers to maintain security hygiene. That’s a lot of blind faith. 3. Governments have the desire, capacity and experience to tap into the cloud-service providers that hold the world’s data. The problem here is manifold. On the one hand, the government can access specific information based on a warrant. On the other hand, it is an entirely different matter to access everything on an as-needs basis, under cover of National Security Letters or their equivalent. Despite their best efforts to security screen and oversee intelligence and law enforcement operations, the government also falls prey to “trusted” staff performing unauthorized actions. These vulnerabilities impact the firm’s liability for data breaches, and the capacity to deliver on a promise of client confidentiality and privacy. In storing sensitive personal and other data, the firm is considered a data controller. As a data controller, the firm is subject to a variety of data protection laws and regulations. Such regulations increasingly create a costly burden to notify individuals affected by data breaches and to purchase several years of identity-theft protection. Emerging European laws mandate heavy fines for firms who violate data protection regulations. If you think the solution is not to use cloud, think again. The concerns outlined above have caused many organizations to have misgivings about adopting cloud-based solutions, thinking perhaps that an on premise solution (a server running in your office) are safer. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Your office or server room isn’t nearly as secure as an access-controlled data center. CloudMask: a silver lining for SaaS CloudMask addresses these vulnerabilities in a way that enables executives to immunize their firms against data- breaches, differentiate by offering highly secure data management and communications, and use economical cloud services with confidence. The CloudMask Approach: CloudMask can provide SaaS users with an easy-to-install browser extension that automatically masks sensitive data before it enters the 256-bit encryption channel to the data center. When that data arrives at the data center where the 256-bit protection ends, CloudMask data stays masked. This process also works in reverse, as in the case when the user requests sensitive data. Here the masked data is double- encrypted as it moves through the secured communications channel. When it arrives in the browser, the 256-bit encryption is removed, and CloudMask seamlessly unmasks to present the data in the clear. Alongside controlling users and their access rights, practice management account owners/administrators can have the capacity to select specific fields to be masked. Not all data needs to be masked and protected, but data categorized as sensitive personal data, personally identifying, or otherwise confidential, can be selected for automated, seamless masking and unmasking.
- 4. From a functional perspective, CloudMask resolves the concerns that executives might have with respect to using SaaS applications: 1. Each user authorized to access the SaaS account installs a CloudMask browser extension that is activated through a simple process generating the personal, private and public keys required for the encryption process. What’s more, the extension can be installed on multiple personal devices, each of which is personalized with a private key. Thus, even if a username and password are somehow compromised, which under normal circumstances would allow anyone anywhere in the world to log into the account and see data in the clear, the unauthorized user cannot do so without access to the specific devices configured with the personalized browser extension. 2. The data stored under care of the data center remains masked while at rest or in motion. Neither the practice management SaaS vendor nor CloudMask administrators nor data center administrators have keys that can be used to unmask the data. If the data center suffers a breach (e.g., an unauthorized insider penetrates the database, or a government agency serves a National Security Letter), data the user has designated as sensitive remains protected. 3. The data stored under care of the data center is masked in such a way (“tokenization”) that anonymizes what was previously sensitive data. Thus, even if that data is stolen, it is no longer considered sensitive personal information or personally identifying information, so it no longer falls under data protection regulations or requirements. In other words, breaches of systems holding tokenized data do not trigger the costly response and remediation efforts associated with breaches of systems holding sensitive personal information. The Technical Story A separate e-book explains the technical details behind this process and the software that automates it, as well as describing the benefits of encrypting and tokenizing data, which we collectively refer to as “masking.” It also provides a brief explanation of the well-established public/private key methods used by the encryption process. Grounded Confidence CloudMask is unique in having its “CloudMask engine” certified through a Common Criteria for Information Technology Security Evaluation (Common Criteria) process, which is used by twenty-six federal governments to evaluate security products for their own use. The process of independent evaluation assesses whether a product’s functional claims live up to the way it is coded and performs. Many products claim to be “bank-grade” or “military-grade,” both of which are subjective assessments. CloudMask is the only data-masking product capable of working with SaaS offers to achieve Common Criteria certification. More expensive competitors like Cipher Cloud and Ionic have not achieved such objective criteria. Technical advisors can access CloudMask’s Common Criteria Assessment here. It’s easy to get started with CloudMask. Visit www.cloudmask.com