The Expert Podcast

If you have some type of cyber insurance on your business—maybe it's part of your liability policy or maybe it's part of your general insurance—make sure that you double-check what the coverages are. A cybersecurity firm found that 80% of insured companies do not have sufficient coverage for what a breach might cost them.

The reason why is that many standard lines of insurance, you know, like general liability and professional liability, have a rider for cyber insurance. It's not a standalone cyber policy. Many times, these riders have a $25,000 or $50,000 limit, but it may not have the type of coverage that's needed if you actually do get a breach or an attack.

A standalone cyber policy, first of all, will have much higher limits. They have shown that a typical cyber attack costs a business between $300,000 and $700,000. In addition to that, these cyber policies that are separate standalone policies also have built-in active monitoring, meaning that they're going to monitor your network 24/7, so they'll know an attack is happening long before you do.

In addition, they will have a response team—think Ghostbusters. If you do have an attack, pick up the phone and call them, and say, "Look, I'm getting attacked by some cyber ransomware hacker," and they'll know what to do. They'll work with your IT people and with your management, but they'll be kind of like an outside resource that you can rely upon. You can't call the police for this; they don't know what to do.

So make sure that you look at your coverage and talk to a cybersecurity expert. You could do a consultation with us below or any expert to find out what types of best practices would work in your specific business scenario. Keep in mind that many times these cyber policies don't cost any more than a cyber rider on your traditional insurance, so it's not going to be a cost issue in most cases. It's going to be an issue to match your risk to the transfer of threats that you have in your business to make sure it's not a deal breaker.

Again, we've talked about it before on this channel—60% of businesses that have a ransomware cyber attack go out of business within 24 months. You don't want that to be you.