Many businesses across the country have been forced to work remotely with very little time to prepare due to the coronavirus. Below are some examples of cyber exposures, relevant coverage you need in your policy, and ways business owners can secure their operations while working remotely.

Cyber criminals have registered over 4,000 domain names containing “Corona” and/or “Covid.” These hackers are using their fraudulent domains to deploy phishing and ransomware attacks. They are impostors luring people into thinking they are COVID-19 help. They send deceitful messages, with malicious intent, appearing as if they are coming from a medical specialist, the World Health Organization (WHO), the Center for Disease Control & Prevention (CDS), or even internal workplace notifications.

What is Cyber Insurance?

It’s coverage for your intangible assets. The assets in your servers, systems and computers. Your data.

Is it expensive to get hacked?

Yes, it’s very expensive. You can be fined by the federal government, state government, and private regulatory bodies.

Next you’re required to notify and provided credit monitoring to the individuals whom you lost their information.

Finally, you’re going to have to hire an IT forensic specialist to find out exactly what happened. They typically cost $200-300 per hour.

Do you accept credit cards? If so, you can be fined up to half a million dollars. This is before the fraud and reissuance costs.

Lose health care information? That can cost up $50,000 per record lost.

And that’s not everything you need to be worried about. What if a hacker takes down your system and you cannot work? You need to be concerned about business interruption and reputational harm.

What about the cost of social engineering, phishing, and extortion?

Cyber Liability Insurance is necessary for every business given the world we live in today.

Thankfully a stand-alone cyber liability, also known as data breach, insurance policy covers all these things and more!

What does a General Agency Insurance Cyber Liability Insurance Plan do for you?

• Third Party Liability for financial loss
• Notification Coverage and Call Center Services
• Forensic Expense Coverage
• Lost Income Coverage
• Business Interruption Coverage
• Risk Management services provided to policyholders, including, but not limited to:
  • Best Practices
  • Recent related cyber threats
  • Prevention methods from expert partners
  • On-demand webinars
  • E-learning website for employees
  • And more…

Three Practices we Recommend to Business Owners to Avoid a Cyber Attack during COVID-19

1)      Multi Factor Authentication:

          Since most employees are now working from home. We recommend using Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) when logging into a remote desktop or email related accounts that require a user name and password. MFA is an authentication method in which a computer only allows access to the user after they successfully entered two or more pieces of evidence to prove it is indeed that user. This is one of the most successful methods to prevent hackers from using brute force attacks. This is when they run a program that rallies through a series of passwords until one works. There are several free MFA options available to everyone.

2)      Employee Training:

           When it comes to a cyber attack, you are only as strong as your weakest link. If one person clicks a bad link or opens the wrong email, the whole company is at jeopardy. Most cyber liability polices come with several preventative training solutions. Some have training videos for employees that teach them about Ransomware, social engineering, phishing and malware, password and identity thief protection and more. Others ways to train employees include Phishing training. Doing this allow you to create fake phishing email campaigns to send to employees. If someone on the staff opens the email and clicks on a link, you can be notified and they will be promoted to watch an educational video to raise awareness.

3)      Create a Business Continuity Plan:

           In the event of a cyber attack, it’s best to have a plan of action ready to be put in place to help contain the incident as quickly as possible. Most of the cyber liability insurance policies come with serval risk management tips including how to create, develop and test your plan.

Protecting yourself from a cyber attack can be scary and it’s not something to try to do on your own. That’s why The General Agency offers Cyber Liability Insurance to its clients. We are here to help your business survive a cyber attack. Make sure that you’re not the one stuck paying for it when you’re one of the 60% of businesses that will be hacked this year.

Check out our prior blog post, “Best Practices for Law Firms During a Pandemic“