In an ever-growing digital world, make sure you are protected from the consequences of cyber attacks by investing in cyber insurance
What is cyber insurance?
Cyber insurance is a type of insurance that helps businesses and individuals financially recover from the effects of cyberattacks and data breaches. It covers costs like investigating the incident, notifying affected parties, legal expenses, and potential liability claims.
Why is cyber insurance important?
In an ever-growing digital age, cyber insurance is more important than ever. Cyber insurance acts as safety net and helps to protect businesses from the financial fallout of cyberattacks and data breaches. If an incident occurs, the insurance will cover the costs of investigating and mitigating the breach, legal expenses, notifying affected parties, and potential court cases.
Cyber insurance also assists in complying with data protection regulations and manages the potentially severe damage to a company’s reputation. By investing in cyber insurance, businesses can transfer some of the risk to insurance providers, promote good cybersecurity practices, and gain peace of mind in an increasingly risky digital world.
Knowing that you have cyber insurance can provide peace of mind to executives, board members and both internal and external stakeholders. It demonstrates a commitment to managing cybersecurity risks and can help reduce the concern associated with potential financial losses from cyber incidents.
What type of business can benefit from cyber insurance?
Cyber insurance can benefit most businesses, especially those reliant on digital operations, use a lot of customer data and those that use online transactions. This includes SMEs, large corporations, e-commerce businesses, healthcare providers, financial services, educational services, charities and more.
What does cyber insurance typically cover?
Insurers may offer a typical package or allow for businesses to create a tailored policy for their specific needs however, with most policies first-party coverage of losses through data destruction, hacking and data theft are included.
The core areas that cyber insurance covers are:
- Notifying customers of cyberattacks
- Ransom demands
- Data breaches whereby information is stolen or accessed without authorisation
- The cost of recovering data due to cyber attacks
- Misuse of computing resources and the cost of repairing computer systems damaged by attacks
- Risk of theft of money from company bank accounts
- Recovering personal identities
- Coverage for legal expenses incurred through cyber attacks
What does cyber insurance not cover?
Often cyber insurance will exclude issues that were preventable or caused by human error, including insider attacks, poor security processes, prior breaches that occurred before the policy began and any costs related to improving technology systems.
What are the requirements for cyber insurance?
Like with most insurance policies, each one varies slightly and is dependent on many different factors. There is no one size fits all however, the main requirements that many policies require include a combination of the below.
Regular vulnerability/risk assessments
This is an evaluation of a business’s digital systems and network to identify potential weaknesses or vulnerabilities that could be exploited by cybercriminals.
Insurance companies often require vulnerability assessments as part of the underwriting process. By conducting these assessments, businesses can proactively identify and address security gaps, which can potentially lead to better terms and rates for their cyber insurance policies.
Multi-factor authentication
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), is a security method that requires a user to provide two or more authentication factors to access an account. These factors can include something the user knows (like a password), something they have (like a mobile device), or something they are (like a fingerprint), enhancing account security.
Encryption
Encryption is the process of converting data into a code to protect it from unauthorised access or theft. It ensures that only authorised people can decipher and read the information.
Find out more about encryption here
Privileged access management/strong access controls
Privileged Access Management (PAM), is a cybersecurity strategy that focuses on safeguarding and controlling access to critical systems, data, and resources within an organisation.
PAM solutions manage and monitor the activities of privileged users, such as IT Managers, who have elevated access rights. They enforce strict access controls, require multifactor authentication, and create audit trails for privileged accounts. By doing so, PAM helps prevent insider threats, limit exposure to external attacks, and ensure compliance with security and privacy regulations.
Endpoint and response detection
Focusing on endpoint security, this detection protects devices such as laptops, desktops, tablets, and servers from real-time and actionable advanced threats. When a threat is detected, an alert is triggered in the system and the IT Team can investigate further, enabling them to have visibility of this breach as well as past breaches. This enables a better understanding on how attacks happened and bypassed security measures, meaning that the IT Team stop it happening again.
Separate back-ups
Having a single data backup is not sufficient enough to shield businesses from potential cyberattacks, to ensure comprehensive protection, it’s crucial to maintain remote backups separate from your regular environment.
Should one backup get compromised, having another secure copy is vital. Additionally, diversifying backup locations is equally important. By doing so, your data remains secure even if one location faces an attack.
Having distinct backups is a fundamental requirement for obtaining cyber insurance. Without this safeguard, your vulnerability to data compromise is significantly higher, potentially leaving you without protection.
Find out more about back-ups here
How can DNS help?
If your business requires cyber insurance but you need to ensure that all the requirements for your policy are in order, don’t worry the DNS Team can help. Our team of IT experts will take all the technical IT and cyber security requirements off your hands ensure that your business is ready to take out cyber insurance.
Need our help? Contact us here
