Not having the right cyber liability insurance could put you out of business!
Do you collect ANY personal information from your clients and/or prospects? If so, then you have a need for cyber liability insurance NOW!
This could be as simple as full names, dates of birth or addresses.
As a business owner, you need to be concerned about the privacy and security of the personal identifiable information that you retain of your customers. Data breach and cyber liability risks have become huge issues for business owners.
The threats to small business are on the rise because personal identifiable information is everywhere. Your office files, smart phone, computer hard drive, thumb drives or tablets. Anyone can now become a hacker simply by buying a cheap malware program. The top three threats are from mobile computing, social networks and cloud computing.
Do you know that data breaches aren’t typically covered by most general liability insurance policies.?
Hackers can cause companies to have trouble with class-action lawsuits, regulatory claims, lower stock values and public relation campaigns to reverse a damaged image.
Data breach to your customer’s information does not need to be in a digital format. Having a break-in at your office or leaving your briefcase in a restaurant could cause you to have a data breach incident. Privacy liability is a risk that almost all businesses have. If you retain any personal information on your customers
What if your system is hacked? How about if you leave your laptop or smart phone at a public location or it is lost or stolen? What if someone opens an email that they shouldn’t and it gives your system a virus which then your system spreads to other computers? How about if the credit card vendor you use has a data breach? Did you know that by law they are only required to notify you and you are still required to notify all of your customers? These types of events can happy every day to the small business owner that is why you MUST have Cyber liability coverage.
The insurance companies are responding to the growing concern of small business owners by offering a cyber liability insurance policy.
Data Breach Insurance coverage is available at Huff Insurance because we understand how important it is. The cost to notify your customers of a possible breach is over $200 per client. So if you have 1000 customers the cost just to notify would be $200,000. Do you want to pay this from your operating account or have an insurance company pay on your behalf?
A true cyber liability insurance policy provides coverage for both 1st party and 3rd party claims that will provide coverage for breach notification costs, credit monitoring service costs, computer forensics costs, regulatory action and regulatory defense as well as crisis management and media liability coverage.
Website Media Liability Insurance coverage can be added to cyber policies to provide coverage for infringement of copyright and/or trademarks, invasion or privacy, libel, slander or even negligence or plagiarisms on your company’s website.
Some breaches can occur within an organization, for example a disgruntled employee deletes all of the files to a large project days before completion. We all hope this will never happen to us, but it can.
Additional cyber threats come from the following:
- Telephone toll fraud: Do you have a VOIP telephone system? Hackers are accessing the system and spending thousands of dollars making long distance phone calls on your bill.
- Deceptive transfer: This occurs when someone in the company receives an urgent email that they must wire-transfer money to the owner of the business. The email appears to be coming from the owner but rather it is coming from a hacker and by the time the scam is realized the money is gone.
- Cyber extortion: This occurs when a company has their data held by a 3rd party and they demand money or they will erase the data or bring the website down.. Remember the infamous “CryptoLocker” that caused major issues for thousands of companies of all sizes a couple of years ago?
When a cyber-attack affects your business you also can lose business, if your website has to be down while the compromise is being located, this could cause you to lose customers and income. Your business policy is not going to pay for the loss of business income, if the cause of the business income is not covered by the policy.
Don’t delay this coverage is crucial to the viability of your business. Cyber Liability Insurance or Data Breach Insurance is just as important, if not more important to you, than your Business Property Insurance or Business Auto Insurance. This is true, because in this case, you could be a victim of a crime that could cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Call Huff Insurance today at 410-647-1111 or fill out the quote request form above.
