Cyber Insurance

A: Different policies may offer different coverage, but standard commercial policies typically do not offer cyber liability cover - general liability is built to cover risks like physical injury or property damage, while professional indemnity almost explicitly does not cover cyber events. This means you will not have insurance cover if your business is hit by a cyber attack or data breach, unless specifically insured with a cyber policy.

A: Cybercrime is increasingly focused on intercepting electronic fund transfers. This is often because these scams are hard to spot - cybercriminals study how their victims send and receive payment requests, and scam requests often come from legitimate email accounts that have been compromised. Payments are often unrecoverable as they are siphoned off into other accounts quickly, and so banks are rarely able to recall the funds and refund the losses. Cyber insurance can help to reimburse significant financial losses that come from scams like these. In fact, funds transfer fraud makes up about a quarter of some cyber insurance providers' claims globally.

A: Many SMEs struggle to maintain their own in-house cyber security or incident response team.  A good cyber insurance policy will give you access to proactive cyber attack prevention services, utilising a range of techniques unavailable to everyday businesses like vulnerability scanning, threat monitoring, and intelligence feeds, all at no extra cost.

A: Each cyber attack is different, and the length of system downtime can vary. In some cases, business operations can be severely impacted for weeks or even months after a cyber event. Back-ups are frequently targeted and either deleted or encrypted during these attacks, leaving businesses with little recourse when it comes to reinstating their data. Cyber insurance gives you access to a range of technical experts to help get you back online fast, while covering financial losses incurred from this interruption to your business operations along with the costs of recreating any loss or corrupted data.

A: Having good cyber security controls in place can make an organisation less vulnerable to attack, but it does not make a business 100% secure. Indeed, humans are often the weakest link in the cyber security chain. This includes everything from employees clicking on a malicious link or attachment in a phishing email, using weak and corruptible passwords, not following up new funds transfer requests with a phone call, or losing devices containing sensitive information. A good cyber insurance policy covers the financial losses that can result from these common errors, as well as giving you access to technical experts if someone makes a mistake.