Cyber Insurance Quotes

With the increasing reliance on technology for any business interaction these days, and with your data being more valuable than ever, Cyber Insurance is a keyway to defend your business against interruption or loss. Unfortunately, companies are seeing their costs for insurance double or more this year over the same time last year.  

There are multiple factors that can increase your insurance rates legitimately that are out with your control: 

• The cyber insurance market is relatively new, they don’t have decades of claims history to work off when quoting for coverage. Last year they saw more claims than expected and at a higher value than expected. This year’s price rises are partly due to the market adjusting to the latest information 

• The type of industry you are in, certain sectors are considered higher risk than others and quoted at a higher rate to start with 
• Turnover, the more money you deal with the higher your quotation cost 
• Increased risk with new state sponsored terror attacks from countries like North Korea who use it as a means of income to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and retaliatory cyber-attacks 

Companies are even reducing the insurance on their physical assets with the realisation that their data is just as important. 

There are key things you can do to help reduce your costs the simplest being shop around, different companies see different business areas as more of a risk than others where one company may see the IT sector as elevated risk and increase premiums another may only see it as medium risk. The types of coverage the insurance supplies and the value which it protects you for will also affect the final cost.  

Ensuring processes are in place in your finance department for anything to do with changes of bank details by contacting the third party to confirm the change by an alternative contact method. Ensuring you confirm the bank details of a third party you have not dealt with before by an alternative method before first time payment. Ensuring large payments are authorised by at least 2 people internally before payment is made. 

However, there are technical controls you can put in place that will help reduce your quotation cost as you are seen as a lower risk business to deal with these can include but are not limited to: 

• Protecting all your logins with multi-factor authentication MFA (Multi Factor Authentication) 
• More modern antivirus/malware software known as EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) 

• Security training all your staff to recognise phishing/spam e-mails with regular testing  
• Next generation firewalls that scan all incoming and outgoing traffic to protect you  
• Custom threat analysis that checks the Dark Web for any signs of your data being sold 
• Removing admin rights from all your normal users which helps prevent malware from getting installed in the first place 
• Vulnerability scanning your network externally to find and remove weaknesses 

• Modern backup and business continuity systems to ensure if you are hit you can recover 
• E-mail and web filtering to ensure all e-mails and web browsing is done securely 
• Patching of all your machines to make sure they have the latest security updates 
• Encrypting the disks of all your end user devices so if they are lost or stolen data cannot be recovered 

Previously attacks used to be about encrypting your data and denying access to it, however these days it is moving more towards extracting your data and extorting you with its sale on the Dark Web and breaching regulations like GDPR. A good example is the recent health care attack in Australia which hit the news: 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/11/medical-data-hacked-from-10m-australians-begins-to-appear-on-dark-web 

For more information on how to protect yourself please contact Shackleton Technologies.