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What does Cyber insurance cover?
Cyber insurance, also known as Cyber security or Cyber liability insurance, is protection for your business from illegal attacks to access your organisations’ data or to disrupt their operations for criminal, espionage, politics or simply for mischief.
No matter how robust your IT security protocols are, they cannot prevent human error, and all it takes is for one person to make one mistake.
With businesses increasingly relying on technology to drive core objectives, the risk of losing money and data, or technology being denied or failing due to accidental or malicious interference has never been greater. So, to keep up with the digital age, insurance evolved to remain relevant to what has fast become the top concern for most businesses globally - their cyber risk
Business leaders without a well-thought-out strategy around cyber protection are effectively gambling with all their funds to develop their business. Or depending on your cash reserves, your very survival.
There are two types of business.....those who’ve been hacked and those that will be. (The FBI, 2012)
How does Cyber insurance work?
Cyber events can disrupt organisations of all sizes, across all industries, causing reputational damage, operational downtime, financial loss and legal action. Cyber insurance is there to minimise and mitigate these risks.
A solid Cybersecurity policy typically covers:
- Incident response support to include IT forensics, Legal and PR services.
- Business interruption cover, providing protection for income
- Digital and data asset loss, including the cost of repair, restoration or replacement
- Information Security and Privacy Liability
- Cyber terrorism and extortion
- Cyber Crime cover to help you recover lost funds from financially motivated attacks such as funds transfer fraud
- Multimedia Liability (Defamation/IP Infringement)
- Defence costs, civil fines and penalties, where insurable by law
At Howden we aim to support you in your cyber journey by ensuring that you have the knowledge and tools to achieve business resilience, leveraging our strong insurer partnerships to negotiate the most appropriate deals on your behalf.
We make sure that you know how your insurance policy can respond to a cyber incident, and have a strong, experienced claims handling team to support you during the claims process, should an incident occur.
Common forms of cyber-attacks
From targeted ransomware and hacking, to phishing, malware, email compromise, fraud, data breaches, social engineering and employee error, the threat landscape continues growing in size and complexity. Millions of attacks are launched at firms every day, some actually succeed in breaching these companies’ defences and wreak havoc.
An increasingly popular form of attack uses emails that appear to be from a known teammate, to trick people into installing malicious software – it’s an easy mistake that can lead to your business being locked down, losing money and held to ransom.
A growing number of breaches come from your employees (often disgruntled) with insider knowledge.
If the FBI and the Pentagon can be hacked, no-one is safe
Key reasons cyber cover is essential for businesses large and small
- Everyone makes mistakes, even smart people can do irrational things when it comes to protecting an organisation’s data.
- Cyber criminals are always finding new ways to trick their staff into collaborating with them inadvertently.
- Rogue employees – a large proportion of hacks and breaches are committed by current members of staff with a grievance.
- Many businesses in supply chains have a requirement to get cyber insurance as part of a compliance checklist for vendor companies.
- The biggest firewall in the world won’t protect your system from people inside.
Additional benefits of the Howden service
Help dealing with insurers
Dealing with an insurer can get a little confrontational; much better communicate through a friendly, professional broker who brings them millions of dollars of business each year. The mutual respect between insurers and a global brokerage means we can move quickly towards a fair resolution, always acting in your interests.
Risk management training
To help you plan for and reduce risk, we provide seminars, tools and training – to get the most of your policy before an incident happens.
Policy wording reviews
Subtle differences in wording can create gaps you didn’t even know were there. Identifying gaps early can save a lot of headaches later. We are always testing out policy wordings with real scenarios to make sure they are fully up to date and responsive to the latest challenges.
If you’ve not budgeted for cyber insurance this year, remember that cyber criminals will not wait.
Cyber troubleshooting is a Howden speciality.
Maybe it’s not for you, but having diverse experts on hand can save you time when you are racing to contain your losses before they get completely out of hand.