Cyber Liability

Cyber insurance, also known as cyber liability insurance, can help to protect your business against a data breach, security failure, illegal threat or cyber-attack. This commercial cover is designed to react quickly to malware attacks, hacking events and electronic data breaches by funding investigation and reimbursing losses.

All businesses, from a small florist to large multinational banks, have a duty of care to keep data secure, and the ramifications of not doing so can lead to severe legal, financial and reputational damage. If your business processes sensitive data, such as credit cards, or you have intellectual property or personal information on your employees, customers or contractors, you need to consider your cyber risk.

As a business, you are ultimately responsible for putting practices in place to control cyber security within your organisation. While IT security measures can help minimise the risk of a cyber-attack from happening in the first place, this type of policy can help minimise disruption to your organisation, covering the financial costs involved in handling and recovering from a cyber-attack or hacking threat.

A cyber insurance policy is not a traditional insurance policy that will pay out a monetary amount in the event of a loss. The benefits it provides are much broader and in fact it is the access to expertise advice and support that you would otherwise not have that is the real benefit. Here are some examples of the more common insuring clauses and where they would apply:

• Data breach – Cover would be provided for losses incurred by you if you suffer from the unauthorised access, use or disclosure of personal data. Cover would generally include expenses related to the management of an incident, the investigation, the remediation, data subject notification, call management, credit checking for data subjects, legal costs, court attendance and regulatory fines.
  
  
• Multimedia/Media liability cover - If a claim is made against you arising from the content of your email, website or other electronic communications as a result of alterations made by a hacker, Insurers would pay for compensation and defence costs.
  
  
• Extortion liability- Cover is typically provided for losses due to a threat of extortion and professional fees related to and dealing with the extortion.
  
  
• Network security / Privacy liability – Cover would be provided for third-party damages as a result of breach of confidence or invasion of privacy including public disclosure of private facts or of confidential information or intrusion into private life, or failure to maintain the security of personal data or to comply with the requirements of data protection legislation.

Our Commercial Insurance Brokers will be happy to take you through every stage of this complex insurance to ensure you understand fully the cover in place for your assets.