Cyber Liability Insurance – an overview

What is Cyber Liability Insurance

The concept of Cyber Liability Insurance was virtually unheard of until recent years however with the increase in the number hacking’s, viruses and data breaches, it is certainly something that companies are putting an increased focus on.  Or if they aren’t they really should seek appropriate advice to see if it is something they should be concerned about.

So why insure? Its quite simple – companies need to try to mitigate against the costs of these things happening.  The cost involved for example in data recovery after a data breach can be substantial and if not rectified quickly and customer confidence restored it could have a potentiality catastrophic affect on your business.

Around there world more and more of us are shopping online from groceries, to clothes to holidays and with this brings increased opportunities for cyber criminals to cast their net with so much of our personal data out there in the online world.  As a business we need to protect these consumers and while Cyber Liability Insurance can help us in the unfortunate event that it happens, it is important to be proactive from the inside.

Ways of reducing Cyber threats to your business

Rigby Financial have produced a summary of measures as an indication of the types of things companies can do to reduce the potential for Cyber Crime for example:

• Ensure your staff are trained to spot the latest threats.
• Use data encryption to protect the data on a hard drive so that it can only be accessed with a decryption key rather than just a simple password.
• Protect hardware by installing doors that require a swipe pass to access a particular room or computer locks for desks. Sounds simple but you would be surprised how many business forget the most simple of controls.

Other things companies can do include for example:

• Use of strong passwords.
• Use common sense when it comes to public wi-fi and links in emails
• If customers can pay on line ensure that appropriate verification of cards is used
• Keep software and operating systems up to date

The above is a small selection of some of things you can do to protect your business. Do consult a specialist in this area if you have queries. I have seen companies offering one off cyber audits which would be money well spent. As always insurance is to protect if something happens but you do need to take steps to hope you never have to use it!

Note: This is a collaborative post in conjunction with Rigby Financial