Everybody is saying that Cyber Insurance will be more prolific than any other policy in the next few years. Is anyone actually telling you why though? Think of it like this. You currently take out insurance for your business to cover you against Fires, Theft, Storm, Floods etc. You put physical security such as locks and alarms in place to protect your business or use non-flammable materials to build your properties. This is all actually quite time consuming for you and expensive to put in place and get right.
Cyber Insurance covers you for a threat that is much more likely to happen to you than the physical hazards above. Just like securing your business on the outside you also need to be securing things not just within your IT systems but you need it to be the very mantra of your business. Not only can criminals get into your system from external sources but your own staff can cause your business major problems if they aren’t careful with how your data is looked after and how emails and messages are dealt with.
So instead of us telling you why you should have had Cyber Insurance, how about we tell you what has happened so far. In all three situations that follow the Insurance company covered the amounts needed to put the business back on track. The below situations actually happened with a few changes so as not to release any sensitive data, that is of course what we are all trying to achieve:
The Technology Business and Malware
Cost covered by Hiscox: £250k
The client was contacted by a government agency and advised that government security services had detected an intrusion on its systems. Our IT forensic experts were deployed to investigate and assess the extent to which the network had been compromised.
A significant amount of malware was discovered on our client’s servers so a containment plan was executed to remove all malware. Our client was also able to take legal and PR advice under their insurance cover to help them decide how and when to communicate this incident to their clients.
The Optician Held To Ransom
Cost covered by Hiscox: £60k
An employee from a chain of opticians received an email to say that she had been caught speeding and clicked the button which offered to show a photograph of her being caught in the act. Shortly afterwards our client received an email from someone in Russia to say that they had infected their systems with the Cryptolocker virus and that all files on its servers were encrypted. The encrypted files included patient records and software used to run the business. The Russians were asking for £400 in Bitcoins for the decryption key. We approved the client’s payment of the ransom. Unfortunately this only recovered 90% of the files and they needed an IT contractor to help them recover the remainder. Their insurance policy covered this business interruption as well as the costs of being unable to trade for a couple of days and not being fully up-to-speed for a couple of weeks.
The Publisher’s Lost Passwords
Cost covered by Hiscox: £10k
Contacted by a ‘white hat hacker’, our client was told that user names and passwords for two of their websites had been stolen. We called in IT forensic experts to investigate, who confirmed there had been a hack and set about plugging the security breach.
Legal advice was also taken to confirm whether or not our client was required to notify the individuals whose user names had been compromised.
As you can see above with information provided from the Hiscox back catalogue of claims. Unfortunately you as business owners aren’t being shown the bigger picture. The bigger picture is that every business is even more vulnerable from attack or disaster than from physical perils and hazards yet the majority of businesses do not have the last line of defence in place. They pay a lot in Insurance every year but if they haven’t covered their digital systems then it is all for nought.
If you are lucky you will get a “White Hat Hacker” (a hacker of ethical sources who is trying to help you), like in the last scenario and they will alert you to an issue. Nine times out of ten though, this won’t happen. Oakes Insure are agents for Hiscox who have been providing Cyber and Crime Insurance for 20 years and are one of the world’s leading experts in this area of Insurance.
These scenarios give a cross-section of what could happen to any business, large or small. If you use a computer system and either hold data and regularly send emails, you really should now have some element of Cyber Insurance even if it is the most basic of liability to others.