According to the FBI, billions of dollars are lost every year repairing computer systems and networks hit by cyberattacks like ransomware. The 2019 Internet Crime Report notes that in 2019 alone, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center received 467,361 complaints of cybercrime with reported losses exceeding $3.5 billion. While the number of ransomware attacks has declined sharply, the amounts demanded in such attacks has increased. For example, BleepingComputer recently reported seeing ransom notes for the Ragnar Locker ransomware, which targets software commonly used by managed service providers, with demands ranging from $200,000 to about $600,000.

Some insurers selling cyber insurance offer to pay a ransom demand, which theoretically should allow the policyholder to get their data back. But what happens if you don’t have cyber insurance or the funds to pay the ransom? What if you pay the ransom and the criminals renege? If your computers and network are slowed but otherwise operable, will your traditional business owners’ insurance policy pay to replace the damaged computers and network?Continue Reading Business owners’ insurance policy required to pay for computer damage from ransomware attack

Savvy in-house counsel and business owners termsoften ask are whether the insurers selling cyber policies actually pay claims or whether the policyholders are just buying the right to later sue the insurers for coverage.  The initial wave of cyber insurance litigation involved policyholders trying to obtain coverage for data breaches under their standard commercial general liability policies.  This produced mixed results with some courts finding coverage, while others did not.  The next wave of cyber insurance litigation involved policyholders asserting
Continue Reading Cyber Insurance: Travelers Required to Defend Healthcare Records Storage Company From Class Actions

Cyber Buyer's GuideYou need cyber insurance to protect your organization from the potentially-devastating financial harm that often follows a data breach, and to protect your brand and guard your reputation. Cyber insurance can help your organization survive a breach and pay the cost to notify customers of the breach and offer them credit monitoring services, defend your organization from class action lawsuits by customers, banks / credit card companies, and shareholders, and defend government investigations and enforcement proceedings. There are no standard-form
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ponemon-institutePreparing for a breach can greatly reduce the cost of a breach according to the Ponemon Institute. Thus, insurers reward those organizations who have taken preparatory steps and implemented defensive measures such as an incident response plan and designated a team to execute that plan. An incident response plan will identify the actions that should be taken when a data incident occurs. Having an incident response plan can result in lower premiums.

Since securing cyber liability insurance is now a
Continue Reading How an Incident Response Plan Can Reduce Your Cyber Insurance Costs

An incident response plan can lead to a better roadmap for securing cost-effective cyber liability insurance and, consequently, lower costs associated with a data breach.

The adoption of an incident response plan is a major indicator to underwriters that an organization is sophisticated and understands that incidents do occur regularly within firewall perimeters and that the organization has an early detection, containment and eradication plan in place to manage incidents, thus protecting data more effectively.

Early detection minimizes the time
Continue Reading Taft Incident Response Planning Webinar Nov. 4

Ben-FranklinFire prevention elements played a large role in the planning of Philadelphia; streets were wider than average and brick and stone were common building elements. Despite these preventive measures and the efforts of firefighters, fires did still occur. Benjamin Franklin began to study this situation and stated “About this time I wrote a paper…on the different accidents and carelessness by which houses were set on fire, with cautions against them, and means purposed of avoiding them.” In 1736 Franklin and
Continue Reading Why Benjamin Franklin Would Want to See Your Incident Response Plan

Two recent cases and NetDiligence’s 2015 Cyber Claims Study suggest that every organization that collects personally identifiable information from consumers should consider buying cyber insurance. PII-Image-672x372

Consumer businesses, non-profits, and government-run utilities often collect consumer personally identifiable information, such as full names, dates of birth, social security numbers, account user names and passwords, etc., in the course of their operations. Many states regulate how such personally identifiable information can be collected, recorded, stored, used, and disposed. If your organization does business
Continue Reading Cyber Insurance: Why You Need It If Your Organization Collects Consumer Data

One reason why businesses don’t buy cyber insurance is because they don’t believe the insurance will pay benefits in the event of a loss.  A recent lawsuit following a data breach that was brought by a wholly-owned subsidiary of CNA Insurance against a large California hospital network highlights the old adage “buyers beware.”

Could you imagine buying car liability insurance where you promised to continuously obey the rules of the road, so that if you were even partially at fault
Continue Reading Cyber Insurance or Illusory Coverage: Is the policy worth the price?

One way to protect your business from financial loss, reputational damage, and the expense of regulatory scrutiny in the event of a data breach is to require your vendors, with access to your customer and employee personally identifiable information, to carry cyber insurance.

Many businesses routinely require their vendors to promise to indemnify them from any loss or expense arising out of the vendor’s goods or services. They also routinely require their vendors to maintain certain types and amounts of
Continue Reading Cyber Insurance: Why you should require certain vendors to have it

The marquee breaches that have occurred recently (i.e. Anthem, Home Depot, Morgan Stanley, Target, Linked In, and Sony) have helped U.S. Fortune 1000 companies understand that data security must be taken seriously.  Not only must companies invest in their data security, but they must proactively manage and protect it.  Previously, large corporations generally considered hacking attacks and general security breaches as “Force Majeure” events in that they were both unpredictable and unpreventable.  Therefore, many of the Fortune 1000 purchased cyber
Continue Reading Cyber Attacks: Small/Mid Cap Companies Beware