The Expert Podcast

Here's another very important reason why it's extremely crucial to scrutinize the issuing of your cyber insurance policy. Many of these companies have all kinds of exclusions in their policy forms where they're limiting payouts. If you are buying cyber insurance, you have to look at it like it's not normal insurance. When you buy an auto policy or homeowner's policy, those are pretty much standardized, and the forms are filed with the state to meet certain criteria.

Most cyber liability policies are what's called excess and surplus lines, where they are not regulated or filed with the state. This is okay because there may not be other markets, but you want to make sure you understand what's in your policy and, more importantly, what's not in your policy. According to the article, companies will need to reevaluate their cyber insurance premiums after major companies are adopting exclusions for catastrophic attacks, which limits the risk companies can offset.

So you're buying insurance for a reason: to have protection. You want to make sure you understand what the protection is. There's perfectly sound logic to maybe buying lower protection, not spending as much money, or buying something catastrophic that only covers very narrow things, but you want to know that. So make sure you read your policy. Don't go by what even the agent or broker tells you because a lot of times, the policies are different from one company to another, so the broker might just have to read it anyway.

Get good advice from a qualified agent and insurance broker, but also read your policy to make sure that you know what's covered and what's not covered. If you have any questions, you can check with your professional to see if they can give you some guidance.