Adding cyber protection to your insurance policy

How would you react to discovering that your business is the victim of a cyber attack? Could you take immediate action to prevent the impact of any leaks of your customers’ data and protect your business’s reputation?

By Laurence O’Connor, managing director, Financial Affairs

While insuring corporate clients against such attacks is something we have been doing for years, it’s only recently that more businesses are recognising a need for this type of policy. In the last year alone we have seen a four-fold increase in corporate customers taking out insurance policies to protect themselves against attacks from hackers.

In our experience, many businesses delay taking out this type of insurance policy. For them cyber attacks aren’t an immediate risk. But with attacks becoming more prevalent and general awareness raised by media reports of cases such as the recent Yahoo data leaks, we’re finding that our corporate customers are beginning to take a more proactive approach, choosing to include cyber protection in their insurance policies.

Cyber attacks – hackers encrypting your files, locking down your systems, stealing your client data and holding you to ransom for its return - are a very real threat for businesses of any size and in any industry. The average cost to small businesses of a cyber attack is around £75,000 - plus, of course, reputational damage that’s impossible to measure.

Cyber protection insurance can help minimise the impact of an attack: a taskforce to advise you on how to better protect your IT systems and data, legal support in the event of data leaks, PR support to communicate what you’re doing to mitigate the situation. We offer cyber protection as part of all our corporate insurance propositions. For us, it’s about raising our clients’ awareness of the risks and encouraging them to insure themselves against them – before it’s too late.