Protect Your Business With Cyber Security Insurance
Nowadays everyone has a stake in the virtual world. Even blue-collar jobs that require mostly hands-on work have client lists and marketing materials kept virtually. This might get you thinking, do I need cyber security insurance for my business or myself? This answer will depend on what you have to lose. It could be a lot more than you think.
What Is Cyber Security Insurance?
Before you decide if you need it, you might be wondering what exactly is cyber security insurance and what does it do? Cyber insurance is there to ease losses from network damage to data breaches. It all depends on what is possible and necessary to protect for the individual or entity.
What Type of Cyber Security insurance Will I need For A Small Business?
Businesses are at risk all the time from hacking and data breaches, and recovery can be very costly depending. Many owners add cyber insurance to their existing business insurance.
Typically, there are two different types, Data Breach Insurance and Cyber Liability Insurance. Let’s look at both.
Cyber Liability Insurance
This type of insurance is mostly for larger business entities. These policies normally cover financial losses due to cyber-attacks. They also can help follow up on problems such as lawsuits and privacy investigations.
When you are attacked, cyber security insurance companies such as the providers Greg Fay Insurance works with will step in and respond on your behalf in the best way to mitigate and recover anything lost. Expenses covered can be anything from regulatory fines from the state to legal services necessary to help you in the situation.
Data Breach Insurance
This type of insurance helps the business owner respond to a breach if personally identifiable information or personal health information you might keep in your business folders or computer get compromised. The situation could be anything from a hacker breaking into your network to an employee accidentally leaving their computer unlocked. Data Breach insurance policy will typically help cover finances to hire a PR firm, notify those affected from customers to employees and offer credit monitoring systems.
Both types of insurance can usually be customized to fit your individual business situation. The cost of each policy will be custom to your situation as well. It will most likely be based on your company’s revenue, number of clients, type of data, and claims history.
Be aware that neither policy is actual business insurance. You will still need general business insurance to cover most claims to protect property and equipment damage, employee claims, and loss of finances due to other situations.
How Can You Help Yourself?
Any good policy will encourage best practices by basing the premiums on the insured’s level of self-protection. For example, let’s look at someone that just doesn’t really think about self-protection. We’ll call him Bob. Bob forgets his passwords often, so decided to just make all of his passwords his dear old doggy’s name “spot”. He also really doesn’t like too much trouble when logging into applications, so he decides not to use 2-factor authentication.
Who’s going to really try to hack into his emails anyway?
Now let’s look at someone that is using best practices to ensure their Cyber security is the best it can be. We’ll call her Amy. Amy also forgets passwords often but uses a password protection manager like LastPass. Now she only has to remember one password and the rest are safeguarded. Amy also finds 2-factor authentication a bother but is willing to set them to all of her applications so that she is extra secure.
Since Bob does not use very many preventative measures, his premiums may be higher. He is a bigger risk to take on since he has a higher chance of getting hacked.
Since Amy is using a lot of preventative measures, she could get lower premiums from being a low-risk policyholder. What Amy is doing is just the tip of the iceberg in how to protect yourself or your business.
How potential are the risks?
Chances are pretty high that there is someone trying to hack your website, your bank account and your identity as you are reading this. Here are some statistics, as given by Varonis.
- Data breaches exposed 36 billion records in the first half of 2020.
- 95% of Cyber security breaches are caused by human error.
- On average, only 5% of companies’ folders are properly protected.
- The average time to identify a breach in 2020 was 207 days.
Future Predicted Trends:
- Cybersecurity skills gaps will remain an issue.
- Remote workers will be a big target for Cyber criminals.
- Cloud breaches will be on the rise due to more remote workforces.
Protect Your Business:
Protect Your Business With Cyber Security Insurance. Losses from network damage to data breaches can destroy your company’s reputation and financial stability. Not to panic you, but Cyber breaches and security hacking are on the rise and they probably won’t slow down. The only thing we can do is to protect ourselves as best we can. Evaluate your individual risk potential, do research into best practices, and do what you can for you and/or your business.
If you are interested in coverage but still don’t know what is best, we’d love to talk to you! Please don’t hesitate to reach out to our office today to get more information.
