Why is Cyber Liability a Really Big Deal?
You own a business. You started it from scratch or bought it as an ongoing entity. It’s a fact of reality, that you are vulnerable to attack. In the old days, they would call it “protection”. Some random bad guy saunters into your fine establishment and informs you that, unless you pay $300 by the end of the week, your building may suffer an unfortunate mishap, like a sudden “fire.” The shakedown begins. The payola has become routine and you build it into your cost of doing business. Old days.
Now we have the discomfort in knowing that today’s bully will rest easy from his armchair, typing away on his keyboard, sniffing around the firewalls and banging away until he breaches your system. Then it’s game on.
Your system get’s locked down and you get the cyber visit from the new kid on the block who will gladly unlock your data for $5,000. Most likely you will be required to “wire” the money offshore, and out of the jurisdiction of the United States.
They get the money. You get the data unlocked.
Now onto the real “shocker” stats!
Ø From 2005 til July, 2016: There have been a total of 6,333 reported data breaches,
involving 864,236,208 compromised records!
Ø 46 states and the District of Columbia have laws requiring the notification of customers following a data breach.
Ø The average cost of a data breach in 2013 in the United States was $158 per breached record.
Ø The top causes of data breaches were malicious or criminal attacks (37%), human error (35%), and system glitches (29%).
Ø Of more than 500 data breaches investigated, more than half required no skill, or only a low degree to perpetrate.
Run-of-the-mill security tools and precautions could have prevented them.
There is no time like the present to review your cyber liability exposure and the “correct” risk transfer methods to make sure you are covered. For more information email us at Info@rarisk.com or call us at 410-568-7272.
Jeff Rosenkilde, Sr. CIC is a Certified Insurance Counselor with over thirty years of experience insuring small businesses in the Mid – Atlantic Area. His firm, Rosenkilde and Associates, insures over 4,000 policy holders and specializes in business insurance and risk transfer.