Cyber crime continues to grow at an alarming rate and at least some insurance companies are paying out more in claims than they are collecting in fees. The growth in losses has been largely a result of ransomware attacks. Social engineering (tricking someone to divulge information or take an action which has malicious consequences) has been the second highest cause of losses. The third is invoice manipulation. Here, someone breaches your network and changes invoices with wiring instructions to the hacker’s account. When the invoice is paid, the money is lost.
To address this problem, rather than charge rates that many organizations could not afford for cybersecurity insurance, you will begin to see new options for co-insurance. What this means is that if you were to make a claim for say $100,000 in damages, your insurance policy might cover 75% and you would be responsible for taking the hit for the other 25%. One might expect that percentages may vary in step with rates. A higher percentage of responsibility by your insurance company would be accompanied by a higher fee.
The other aspect of these new type of cybersecurity insurance policies may be a requirement for certain protections to be in place that were not required in the past. These will likely be:
- A daily backup of your data: For any of our current IT support clients this is in place, typically with an hourly backup locally and to the cloud.
- Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) implementation: We strongly encourage implementing MFA wherever possible. Banking accounts, Microsoft 365 accounts and VPN connections should be at the top of your priority list for implementing MFA. Free MFA authenticators are available so the cost to implement MFA can range from none to a one-time cost for assistance from your IT service provider.
- Phishing Security Training: We offer a testing and on-line training service which is affordable and includes reporting in order to measure results.
BSC can assist in all of these security areas and more, with affordable solutions. Reach out to us today.
