GUEST BLOG BY INSURA BROKING GROUP - THE TRUTH ABOUT CYBER INSURANCE

As a member of the insurance industry we are seeing that no matter how good your IT security program, cyber-attacks are happening to the world’s biggest companies. Whilst your business isn’t NASA, The FBI, Twitter, British Airways or Deloitte (all have been hacked this year) I’m guessing their IT security systems didn’t see their attacks coming either!

Cyber is not a traditional insurance policy. A cyber policy is really designed to be an incident response policy. All insurers have a cyber hotline to get them involved in ASAP.

Rather than waiting to go through a long and drawn-out process of legal recourse against the insured, the cyber policy gives a business the opportunity to respond to the incident, get those specialist services in early and get on the front foot as time is so crucial in these sorts of events.

Cyber liability protection has four key elements of cover:

• First Party Costs

• Third Party Costs

• Business Interruption

• Social Engineering, Phishing & Cyber Fraud

It is important that the Cyber Insurance policy you select for your business has all the appropriate covers and more importantly the sub-limits values within each section to ensure that in the event of a loss your business will be indemnified adequately. Getting the right advice and setting up your policy correctly can only be provided by a qualified Insurance Broker educated and approved to sell these products.    

Waiting periods are also a critical part of Cyber Insurance which vary significantly between policy types.  This relates to the period of time you will need to wait until you can make a claim for costs and business interruption, and in some cases can be as high as 10 days or more.

Your business is important to you and getting the correct insurance coverage is critical, please be careful of schemes offering “free coverage” and “add on coverage” to Liability, Professional indemnity & Business Insurance policies as the coverage offered is generally inferior and most often not covering one of the most critical covers around Social Engineering, Phishing & Cyber Fraud.  

For more information please contact SALO and we can direct you to the right advice on a cyber program for your business.  

Written by Brad Hubble - Insura Broking Group