Ransomware hit TrialWorks, law firms and lawyers were not able to access court documents

TrialWorks, one of the most established providers of legal case management software for law firms and attorneys, was hit by ransomware.

TrialWorks, a company that provides the most established and widely used legal case management software solutions, was a victim of a ransomware attack earlier this month.

At result of the attack, law firms and lawyers, were not able to access the legal documents hosted on TrialWorks’ platform.

On October 13, the company notified its customers of a hosting service outage at their data center.

The day after the company sent to its customers informing them of a security incident caused by ransomware.

“Thank you for your continued patience as we have worked tirelessly to restore access to your data following the ransomware incident TrialWorks experienced,” reads the email.

The company hired several cyber security firms that will help it in investigating the incident and restore normal operations.

On October 15, TrialWorks announced that the threat was completely eradicated from its systems and its staff was “actively decrypting and restoring data.” The announcement suggests that the company obtained in some way the decryption keys to restore the files, likely after paying the ransom.

At the time of writing it is not clear how the ransomware infected the company and which is the family of ransomware involved in the security incident.

The incident had a significant impact on the TrialWorks’s customers, some of them were forced to request the courts to extend the deadline for providing case documents.

The incident was also reported by the Miami Herald that confirmed that a ransomware attack blocked operations of some law firms in the state.2

“Reams of digital legal documents have been held hostage under a ransomware threat to a South Florida software company that manages electronic records for thousands of law firms nationwide, the Miami Herald has learned.” states the Miami Herald.

“TrialWorks acknowledged it “was recently targeted by a ransomware incident that did not affect our software but did prevent approximately 5 percent of our customers … from accessing their accounts.””

At the time of writing, the company restored access to the documents for its customers.

“We are not the first, nor will we be the last organization in our industry to be the target of one of these attacks. However, we have learned from this experience and are committed to expend all the resources required to both address this issue head-on and mitigate the chance of a recurrence.” said Patrice Gimenez, TrialWorks Chief Customer Advocate.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – TrialWorks, ransomware)

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