.png)
Most people picture a cyberattack as something dramatic and obvious. For a small law firm in Greater Boston, the reality is that it usually starts with an email that feels routine and ends with an unexpected phone call.
This is a composite story built from situations we see and hear about regularly. The firm is fictional, but the details are not.
It Started With One Email
A paralegal at a five-person law firm clicked a link in what looked like a document-sharing notification from a vendor the firm actually uses. She entered her credentials on what looked like a legitimate login page and went back to work. The whole thing took thirty seconds and felt like nothing.
Eleven days later, a partner noticed a client hadn't responded about a wire transfer for a real estate closing. He sent a follow-up. The client called back confused because they had already sent the wire on Friday. The partner pulled up the email thread and found a message he did not remember sending, from his own address, with updated wire instructions pointing to an account nobody at the firm had ever heard of.
During those eleven days, the attacker had read thousands of emails, identified the firm’s banking relationships, learned how the partners write, and set up a forwarding rule so that every incoming email was quietly being copied to an address nobody at the firm could see.
What Happened Next
The firm called their IT provider. Passwords were changed, and they were told the situation appeared contained. Nobody checked whether the forwarding rule was still active. Nobody looked at what eleven days of access had actually exposed.
Three days later, a second client called about a suspicious invoice. Then a third.
By the time the firm had a full picture of what happened, the damage was already done. The forensic investigation cost several thousand dollars. The cyber insurance carrier asked for documentation of security controls the firm could not provide. The claim became complicated in ways nobody had anticipated, and the conversations with affected clients were harder than any of the technical recovery work.
What Would Have Stopped It
The entry point was a thirty-second mistake that anyone could have made on a busy afternoon. Multi-factor authentication on that email account would have stopped the attacker cold even after the credentials were stolen, because they would not have had the second factor needed to get in. A simple process of calling to verify any changes to wire instructions would have caught the fraudulent request before the client sent anything.
Neither of those things is expensive or technically complicated. They just require knowing what to put in place and someone making sure it actually happens.
Why This Matters for Your Firm
Law firms hold sensitive client information, manage significant financial transactions, and operate on relationships built entirely on trust and confidentiality. A breach is not just a financial problem. It is a professional and reputational one that can follow a firm for years.
Under the Massachusetts Data Security Law, the obligation to protect client information is not optional, and the consequences of getting it wrong extend well beyond the immediate financial loss. Most small law firms we speak with in Greater Boston are aware of this in a general sense but have never had someone sit down and make sure the basics are actually in place.
If you read this and thought about your own firm, that reaction is worth paying attention to. The firms that avoid situations like this are not the ones that got lucky. They are the ones that asked the hard questions before something forced it.
At Ekaru, we work with professional services firms across Westford, Acton, Chelmsford, Lowell, and greater Boston. If you want to know where your firm actually stands, a free IT assessment is the fastest way to find out.
