A 2024 study by Lubbock Fine found that the number of successful cyber-attacks against UK law firms rose by 77% over a 12-month period, climbing from 538 incidents to 954. The legal sector holds exactly the kind of data cybercriminals are after: client financials, intellectual property, confidential case details, and conveyancing funds. Many firms still rely on firewalls and antivirus software to protect themselves, but these were never designed to stop the kind of threats they’re facing now.
This guide explains why law firms are particularly exposed, where traditional security tools fall short, and how Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) closes the gaps that firewalls and antivirus leave wide open. As an IT company in Manchester supporting legal firms across the region, Cloud Geeni works with practices that need practical, modern cyber security.
The Legal Sector Threat Landscape
Law firms aren’t being targeted at random. They’re singled out because of what they hold and how they operate.
Why Law Firms Are at Risk
A typical practice stores sensitive client information across multiple matters: financial records, personal identification documents, commercial contracts, and privileged legal correspondence. For cybercriminals, this represents a concentrated source of high-value data that can be exploited for fraud, sold on the dark web, or leveraged through ransomware demands. The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has warned specifically that the legal sector is a particularly attractive target because firms routinely handle large sums of money alongside highly sensitive information.
The scale of the problem is growing. An analysis of ICO data by NetDocuments found that data breaches in the UK legal sector rose by 39% between Q3 2023 and Q2 2024, reaching 2,284 reported incidents. Data relating to an estimated 7.9 million individuals was compromised – roughly one in every eight members of the British population.
Threats Law Firms Face
Email remains the most common entry point. Phishing accounted for 56% of all external attacks on legal firms, with tactics ranging from impersonation of clients requesting urgent document reviews to fraudulent payment instructions mimicking senior partners. These attacks are becoming harder to spot, particularly as AI-generated phishing emails now bypass the obvious red flags that staff have been trained to look for.
Beyond phishing, law firms face growing threats from:
- Ransomware with double extortion — attackers steal data before encrypting systems, then threaten to publish confidential client information if demands aren’t met
- Business email compromise (BEC) — fraudulent emails impersonating partners or clients to authorise payments or share sensitive documents
- Human error — a 2024 UK Parliament research briefing highlighted that an estimated 95% of cyber-attacks succeed due to human error, whether that’s clicking a malicious link, using a weak password, or falling for social engineering
The Limits of Traditional Security
Most law firms aren’t ignoring cyber security; they’re just relying on tools that weren’t built for the threats they now face.
What Law Firms Typically Rely On
The standard setup for many small and mid-sized practices includes a firewall at the network perimeter, antivirus software on endpoints, and basic built-in protection such as Windows Defender. These tools have a role to play, but they were designed for a different era of threats – one where malicious software arrived as recognisable files that could be caught by signature-based scanning and where keeping intruders outside the network was enough.
Why Firewalls and Antivirus Aren’t Enough
Firewalls monitor traffic flowing in and out of your network, but they have no visibility into what’s happening on individual devices once a threat gets through. Antivirus works by comparing files against a database of known malware signatures. That means it’s effective against established threats but largely blind to anything new or unfamiliar.
The problem is that modern attacks are designed specifically to bypass these defences. Fileless malware operates entirely in memory without writing detectable files to disk. Living-off-the-land techniques use legitimate system tools like PowerShell and Windows Management Instrumentation to carry out malicious activity; tools that firewalls and antivirus have no reason to flag. The UK Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025 found that 85% of businesses that identified an attack experienced phishing – an attack method that bypasses firewalls entirely by targeting people rather than infrastructure.
What This Looks Like in Practice
A solicitor receives an email that appears to come from a client, referencing a genuine ongoing matter. The attachment contains a script that, once opened, uses PowerShell, a legitimate Windows administration tool, to establish a connection back to the attacker. No malware file is written to the disk, so antivirus detects nothing. The firewall sees outbound traffic on a standard port and allows it through. The attacker now has a foothold inside the network, with the ability to move laterally, escalate privileges, and access sensitive client data – all without triggering a single alert.
This is the gap that EDR is specifically designed to close.
What EDR Actually Detects and Stops
Endpoint Detection and Response takes a fundamentally different approach to security. Rather than scanning files against a list of known threats, EDR continuously monitors endpoint behaviour — looking for suspicious activity patterns regardless of whether the tool or file involved has been seen before. Where antivirus asks, “Is this file known to be bad?”, EDR asks, “Is this behaviour suspicious?”
How Huntress Managed EDR Works
As a managed cyber security partner, Cloud Geeni deploys Huntress Managed EDR – a purpose-built platform that goes well beyond what traditional antivirus can offer.
Huntress doesn’t just detect threats; it provides end-to-end protection backed by a 24/7 AI-assisted Security Operations Centre (SOC) staffed by human analysts. This means threats are identified, investigated, and dealt with around the clock, without your firm needing to employ dedicated security staff. Key capabilities include:
- Behavioural detection: Monitors endpoint activity in real time to identify suspicious patterns, including fileless attacks and living-off-the-land techniques that antivirus misses entirely
- Persistent foothold detection: Identifies malware designed to survive system reboots and maintain long-term access to your network, a common tactic in targeted attacks against law firms
- Automatic remediation: Pre-authorised response actions isolate and neutralise threats without waiting for manual intervention, with an industry-leading mean time to respond of just eight minutes
- Cross-platform coverage: Protects Windows, macOS, and Linux endpoints, closing gaps that arise in mixed-device environments
- Less than 1% false positives: Validated, high-confidence alerts mean your IT team or provider isn’t chasing noise, and genuine threats get the attention they deserve
Returning to the scenario in the previous section: where antivirus saw nothing and the firewall let the traffic through, EDR would detect the unusual PowerShell behaviour, flag the suspicious outbound connection, and isolate the affected endpoint, stopping the attacker before they could move further into the network.
How Managed EDR Proactively Hunts Threats Instead of Passively Waiting
There’s an important distinction between detecting threats when they trigger an alert and actively going out to find them before they do. Managed EDR does both.
Huntress’s dedicated ThreatOps team continuously hunts across customer environments for indicators of compromise – subtle signs that an attacker may already have a presence but hasn’t yet triggered automated detection. This includes:
- Newly discovered attack techniques that existing rules haven’t yet been built to catch
- Unknown persistence mechanisms that allow attackers to maintain access undetected
- Early-stage intrusion activity that sits below the threshold of conventional alerting
For law firms, this matters because the most damaging attacks are rarely instant. Attackers often establish access and move slowly, gathering intelligence on a firm’s systems and client data before acting. Proactive hunting finds them during that window, before data is stolen or ransomware is deployed.
The UK legal sector comprises over 32,000 organisations, and the majority are small to mid-sized practices without the budget for an in-house security team. Through Cloud Geeni’s managed cyber security services, firms gain access to Huntress’s 24/7 SOC analysts and threat hunters – delivered as a fully managed service from a specialist IT provider in Manchester.
Protect Your Firm With Modern Cyber Security
Law firms are prime targets because of the data they hold, the money they handle, and the trust their clients place in them. Firewalls and antivirus software play a role, but they weren’t designed to detect the kind of attacks that now account for the majority of breaches in the legal sector: fileless threats, credential abuse, and social engineering that bypasses perimeter defences entirely.
EDR closes that gap. Managed EDR through Huntress goes further by combining real-time behavioural detection, persistent threat hunting, and 24/7 expert monitoring to find and stop threats before they cause damage.
As an IT company in Manchester with a specialism in managed cyber security, Cloud Geeni helps law firms across Greater Manchester and beyond move from reactive security to proactive protection. If your firm is still relying on traditional tools alone, now is the time to reassess. Speak with our team today about strengthening your cyber defences with managed EDR.
