Securing a Law Firm, part 1: Securing Chrome
On a snowy day, late in December of 2016 I sat in a corner office of a local law firm with the firm's IT manager discussing the hottest topic of the week - ransomware. After a law firm down the road had been hit by a ransomware attack the partners were afraid. They were asking a lot of questions for which the IT manager had serviceable answers. I had my own questions in preparation for my practicum beginning in the new year. Scribbled in various notebooks and loose scraps of paper in my bag laid the anatomy of the day's typical ransomware attack. My previous months had been spent picking up the tools of the infosec trade from the sidelines of Twitter. I wanted to see how much of it I could use. Over lunch I probed the IT Manager about their threat model, what they were prepared for, and their recovery plans for when they failed. I approached them because I knew their environment wasn't prepared for a modern attack. My goal during the meeting was to see just how bad...