If you receive an urgent notice from the state bar about your unpaid invoice, do some investigation before blindly clicking anything. Floria State Bar members recently suffered an outbreak when email disguised as a legitimate message from Bar President Ramón Abadin titled “Florida Bar Association Past Due Invoice” turned out to be something much much worse than a late invoice:
But it is totally bogus and could take over your computer and destroy your files unless you pay a “ransom.”
A member of The Florida Bar forwarded the malicious email to an employee in Membership Records, asking questions because it looked like it legitimately came from the Bar.
The employee clicked on the link and realized it was no good, and forwarded it to [IT Operations Manager Brandon] Gonzalez, who dug into the email and discovered it was coming from a few domains from a host in Houston, Texas.
Frankly it’s amazing this doesn’t happen more often. Targeting lawyers with a late bill preys upon a waiting population of neurotic rule-followers begging to click whatever a hacker offers them in hopes of squaring with the bar association. Sure, this story is about Florida, but this is probably only the beginning. Be ready for this to move to your state.
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The moral, as always, is to keep skeptical. If an email accuses you of something, recognize that it’s using the most provocative possible subject heading for a reason, and don’t click on it.
And if you’ve already failed in that simple rule?
Asked what Florida Bar members should do if they mistakenly click on this email, Gonzalez said: “It’s tough to say, and the reason why is that there are a lot of variants of this CryptoLocker. Some are well known and some are new. They change and there are several iterations. Due to that, they can all have different behaviors. They can install themselves in different areas of the system.”
This is why lawyers should stick to Snapchat for all business transactions.
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Email Scam Alert! [The Florida Bar News]
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Joe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.