What Do Cyber Insurance Policies Cover?
A good cyber liability insurance plan should cover expenses resulting from a cyber attack on your business’ infrastructure or data. This can include:
- Coverage to repair or rebuild infrastructure that’s been damaged following an attack
- Coverage to recover stolen, damaged, or altered data
- Coverage to get up and running again after a cyber ransom event, such as infection with cryptolocker software
- Liability coverage for legal expenses and crisis management following a customer data breach
- Liability coverage for investigations, and regulatory expenses/fines following a data breach
What Do Cybersecurity Insurance Policies NOT Cover?
Cybersecurity insurance is imperative to have in this day in age. However, Cybersecurity Liability Insurance will not protect:
- Loss of profits due to the theft of intellectual property/proprietary information
- New hardware/software upgrades after a breach has occurred
Big Changes to Cybersecurity Insurance in 2022
As mentioned previously, 2021 was a record year for cyber attacks. Because of this, cybersecurity insurers are finding their policies are in much higher demand, and the associated risks have increased.
Insurers have responded by being much more exclusive with who will qualify for insurance coverage. Your organization already needs to have a superstar cybersecurity risk mitigation strategy in place before insurers will even consider you. Additionally, coverage costs have risen, while coverage limits have decreased.
It's likely your organization is going to have to overhaul your current cybersecurity strategy to satisfy insurers' heightened level of scrutiny. For this reason, Blade Technologies has put together this helpful guide to help you become best-in-class for your industry.
Don’t Overpay for Cybersecurity Insurance
There's a lot that goes into the cost of cyber liability insurance. This includes everything from your business' current assessed risk level to what your insurance policies cover.
As cyber attacks continue to increase in frequency, the cost of cybersecurity insurance, in turn, has kept going up. There are several steps you can take to lower cyber insurance premiums. This can be done while continuing to protect your business at the same time.
What You Need to Obtain Cybersecurity Insurance
At the bare minimum, your company or organization should have these cybersecurity measures in place to prevent major damage. If you don't, you could be denied cybersecurity insurance for having too high of a risk.
Have an identity verification and access plan in place. This includes setting up Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for all employee accounts. MFA requires employees to use a specialized code sent to another device when logging into their email or other business accounts.
Have backups of important data readily available. Backup your data frequently and store it somewhere offsite/offline to prevent cyberthieves from compromising it.
Have a weakness management and patching plan. Create a written procedure that details when and how to patch hardware and software to prevent security weaknesses. Include procedures for End-of-Life software and hardware that is no longer supported. This either segregates them from the network or decommissions them.
Deploy an Endpoint Detection and Response Solution (EDR). Catch cyber attacks before they can do damage and prevent them from progressing further.
High-Value Items that Are Likely to Lower Your Cybersecurity Premiums
Various actions will drastically increase your ability to get a lower cybersecurity insurance premium. These actions are designed to strengthen your network security, while keeping your employees informed and alert for potential breach attempts.
Have annual cybersecurity training sessions to keep all employees up to date on best practices to prevent cyber attacks. For example, you can perform phishing attack simulations and monitor employee performance.
Set up security and monitoring for your network. This can be done by deploying a Privileged Access Management (PAM) tool to keep unknown users off your network. In addition, you can create and monitor a 24/7 Security Operations Center, either internally or externally.
Create company procedures for dealing with cybersecurity best practices and what to do in case of a breach.
Enforce Sender Policy Framework (SPF) for incoming emails on company computer systems. This ensures that only employees of your organization can use your domain to send emails.
Risk Management Strategies That Will Lower Cyber Insurance Cost
The best way to lower the cost of cybersecurity insurance is to show the insurance companies that your business means business. Here are several measures you can take to do this and further reduce your risk of cyberattacks:
- Turn off admin rights on all employee devices. This keeps employees from installing questionable software on your devices that might contain malicious programs that can compromise your network.
- Limit the service accounts in the domain administrators’ group. The fewer accounts there are, the less likely one of them will be compromised.
- Test critical data backups from a full restore. Earlier, we mentioned that it was important to back up your data frequently. Testing backups on a regular basis ensures you always have access to your data.
- Deploy email tools that block malicious attachments, files and other items running in sandbox mode. Email is still one of the most common methods cyberthieves use in attempt to compromise networks. With a strong set of email security tools, you can stop cyberattacks before they happen.
- Deploy a security information and event monitoring (SIEM) tool.
- Deploy a data loss monitor tool (DLP).
Taking these measures will prove that you're a step ahead of your industry when it comes to reducing cybersecurity risk. Cybersecurity risk management is the best strategy to lower the cost of your cyber liability insurance.