The Risks and Benefits of Mobile Computing

More and more solo and small firm practitioners are making the most of the advancement in technology to practice law using mobile devices and remote applications. The launch over the last few months of the latest iPhone and Blackberry Storm has been another leap forward in enabling technology.

Not only does mobile technology assist attorneys in managing their client base, it also helps in lowering their business overhead. Mobile devices enable attorneys to work from anywhere. The term ‘Mobile Attorney,’ while meaning a specialization in the past, now relates to the practice of using mobile technology to conduct business.

One of the key aspects of the Mobile Attorney is that they no longer just have a laptop running Microsoft Windows. They are now accessing their email, documents and other business applications via webmail, mobile enabled Document Management Systems (DMS) and a broad array of devices such as Blackberry, iPhone, PDAs, NetBooks and Apple Macs.

But, this brings up an interesting fact. While being a Mobile Attorney has many significant benefits, it does introduce new security risks, especially where the firm's security tools, such as their metadata removal application, is limited to a desktop tool. The Mobile Attorney using the web, DMS or mobile device does not have access to these tools and so fall foul of what I refer to as 'the mobile security gap'. If you are a Mobile Attorney – are you aware of these risks and are you doing anything to make sure you and your data is protected?

PDF documents and metadata - some examples

Before I do a deeper dive into what metadata a PDF document contains, let's take a look at what must have been the main headline hitting example in 2008 of sensitive information being discovered within PDF metadata.

I am referring to the situation Google found themselves in with a submission they made, supposedly anonymously, to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission regarding eBay and their proposal to force their users to use PayPal. After speculation on many blogs about the author of the anonymous submission one Dave Bromage took a look at the metadata in the PDF document and let the world know who it was. Despite the submission being replaced with a new version without the revealing metadata the word was out. I won’t comment on the reasons why this was at least embarrassing to Google (this is one report that gives the details as well as showing the metadata contents), but will add that there was an additional chuckle in the techie community that the metadata also showed that the document had not been created using Google’s own word processing app, one being The Register. My main comment is that this unintentional leakage of information involved a regulator as well as embarrassment at the very least to the originator (author and company).

The submission also had masked what would have been visible text about the submitter within the document. However the PDF did not have any security applied to it so it was very easy to copy that area of the document and paste it into another text processor to see the underlying information. Facebook/ConnectU have just this month fallen foul for the same reason. Numerous other examples in this area, GE and the US Justice Department being a couple of examples from 2008. If you want to mask visible text at the very least add security settings to the PDFs that you generate to disallow copying and pasting of text. Also look at redacting software which fully removes and masks text whilst retaining the layout in the PDF document.

I am sure it is pure coincidence that one of the other headlines in 2008 around information garnered from PDF metadata also involved Google, but from the other side of the fence. As reported here metadata in a PDF version of a lobbying letter from the Corn Farmers to Congress linked, albeit tentatively, the author back to some of Google’s political adversaries.

The lesson from these examples is that you should not assume that converting and sending/publishing a PDF removes metadata that could contain sensitive information.

It might have been quiet on this blog for a while but elsewhere...

I know, I know, it has been a long while since I last posted to this blog! Thank you to all of you who have been checking in regularly.

It has been a busy six months both in terms of data loss instances and also for 3BView. In the case of the latter we have gained great new customers and partners in the intervening time ... you'll be able to find out more about some of them on our website - a new improved version of which is going live next week.

On the former: well watch this space. Many things to blog about, and I will be doing just that over the coming weeks.

Good eWeek article on DLP

EWeek has an interesting article comparing Database Activity Monitoring (DAM) with Data Leak Prevention (DLP).

In the article, Paul Proctor, a Gartner analyst who’s tracked this area for a while, says: “"Most every security monitoring technology would benefit from DLP content awareness, which is the ability to recognize sensitive content on the fly.” Yep, I’d agree with that.

California Bar Journal reviews legal metadata position

The California Bar Journal, in this article, presents an excellent round-up of the problems for lawyers, including the myth that PDF documents are safe from metadata leaks, and the latest legal position in the US. Worth reading.

Eli Lilly’s lawyers accidentally emails confidential info to New York Times

We’ve been here before, but this is a corker. All the pieces of a classic ILP mistake: the $1bn lawsuit, the external law firm accidentally emailing confidential information to the wrong person, and the fact that the wrong person happened to be a New York Times reporter. Oops.

Law firms, get yourself some ILP tools now, before it’s you!

Scottish council caught out by tracked changes

It’s that old classic: sending out a Word document with information you really, really don’t want to reveal left in tracked changes.

This time the metadata culprit is Aberdeenshire County Council, which managed to send out a report on waste management, containing incriminating details of problems in tracked changes that hadn’t made it into the final report.

Even worse than the information revealed is the inference that the council had covered up the information it didn’t like on the problems – and the press has certainly taken this line.