The Expert Podcast

Okay, here's an update on the world of cyber liability and cyber attacks. Here's an article, admittedly from the insurance industry, so they're going to have a bias towards the importance of cyber insurance, but it says it's essential because businesses are combating rising cybercrime. So what does the article say?

Um, there's a cyberattack every 39 seconds in the US, and the sophistication and frequency are going up. It's a significant problem for the manufacturing, professional services, and financial sectors—that's the key. Financial services, in particular, are targeted by cyber hackers who go after companies with a lot of clients and a substantial inventory of names that they can extract from your business.

Even though businesses are ramping up defenses, attacks are still happening. There are over 2,000 each day. The cost of cybercrime is $10 trillion annually, which comes from paying ransoms, defending against attacks, fixing computers that have been damaged by attacks, and other associated costs to your business.

Here's the big scary part: it's more lucrative to have sophisticated attacks, meaning that the hackers are spending more time crafting the attack instead of just blasting shotgun approaches at multiple businesses. They're waiting for victims to leave vulnerabilities in their companies.

One of the key things is making sure you have three elements of protection in your business. Number one: you have best practices for defense. You have two-factor authentication, and you have all your updates and patches. You also have active monitoring. That's the second most important thing—having some type of system that is monitoring your network and all your devices for attacks. You're going to see the attacks every day. That's not going to be the issue. The issue is, are they getting through?

And number three, which is often overlooked, is having some type of response plan. If you were attacked tomorrow, what would you do? Who handles each thing? It's kind of like a fire drill. Your accounting department will have to do things, your HR department will have to do things, your tech department will have to do things, your managers will have to do things. You'll have to contact vendors and customers. Make sure you have a checklist for what each person in each department has to do. So if and when it does happen, you're not caught flatfooted figuring out what's the approach because you may not have access to your system to get a hold of people. So you might want to have a printed checklist or a binder that allows you to jump into action.

A cyber insurance policy will also help you do this, should you decide to get one. But if you have more questions about cyber protection or cyber defense, you can click the link below, and we can talk about it.