Everyone who uses the internet needs to be vigilant when it comes to revealing personal information.
U.K. solicitors are being advised by the English Law Society of current scams and threats.
The Solicitors Regulatory Authority (SRA) have discovered that fraudsters have been sending emails to law firms claiming to be from the SRA.
Reports were received from solicitors’ firms saying they had been sent messages purportedly from the SRA, some of which referred to pending investigations. Two of these were sent from an email account that does not end in @sra.org.uk, while another – discovered around St.Patrick’s day – appeared to be from an SRA email account but wasn’t.
It suggested the firm could be at risk of having its authorisation revoked, and directed the recipient to a website designed to look like the SRA’s pages. The SRA have since had this site shut down.
All emails were reported to appropriate authorities for investigation, and SRA have also been conducting their own internal investigation. The information used for the scams was gleaned from sources outside of the SRA !
Firms that receive such emails were advised not to open them, to forward them to fraud@sra.org.uk, and then to delete them. Firms that have opened the attachment were advised to report it to their bank and IT provider.
Email is the profession’s preferred method of communication, and firms were advised to remind themselves of sound IT security practices. The SRA recently highlighted the problems posed by cybercrime in the Risk Outlook update paper, Spiders in the Web.
This deals with the subjects of phishing, malware and identity theft among others, and any firm that uses IT for its business should be aware of these risks.
– a news update from Kilkenny based law firm Holland Condon
