Cyber security in 2019 – are you insured?
Cyber security in 2019 – are you insured?
The most recent figures for the extent of cybercrime published by the ONS (Office for National Statistics) in March 2018 state that 4.5 million such crimes had been committed in the previous 12 months.
The ONS figures cover all types of cybercrime, including child pornography.
In the first half of 2018, the number of cyber breaches soared over 140% from a year earlier, leading to 3.3 billion compromised data records worldwide, according to Gemalto, an international data security company.
However, the insurer Hiscox has estimated that UK small businesses are being targeted with an average of 65,000 attempted cyber attacks every day, according to the Insurance Times.
Despite this it estimates that only 52% of SMEs have clear security strategies despite it costing an average of £25,700 last year in direct costs (eg ransoms paid and hardware replaced) per attack.
The information cyber criminals are most interest in is Email addresses, Social Security numbers, Credit card numbers, Bank information, Product information and Birth dates.
The most vulnerable areas for businesses are online banking details, cloud servers, emails and data leaks and breaches.
One growing problem is the numbers of fraudulent emails using named individuals, such as the CEO or Finance Officer authorising payments to be made.
Business cybercrime is an ever-increasing threat and businesses should regularly conduct security audits, ensuring they have robust back-up systems and should examine and if necessary, restrict entry points into the system, only giving access codes to those within the company who actually need them.
They should also take out cyber insurance, something that was hardly I existence ten years ago, but is now becoming increasingly important.
You should check that the policy includes practical support including legal advice, forensics and reputation management to help get a business back up and running as quickly as possible.
