In this digital age, one would have to work entirely off the grid to avoid all vulnerabilities to cyber crime. Whether you run your entire business from your phone, a single computer, or a small office, you have as much risk exposure to a digital breach as any large company. In fact, small businesses often have a higher risk simply because they don’t believe themselves to be a target. Criminals will happily make their gains from multiple unprotected small systems when high security large digital networks are too time-consuming to breach.
A Cyber Liability insurance policy is a basic business expense and should be considered along with the rest of your business insurance checklist items like commercial property, general liability, and workers compensation.
What Are the Most Common Cyber Attacks on Small Businesses?
While most of us have learned to spot the extremely obvious cyber scams – that poor Nigerian prince may never get his inheritance – it’s harder to identify more sophisticated cyber attacks. Following are a few of the common attacks being perpetrated on businesses and individuals, according to an article by Advisorsmith:
- Phishing – In these scams, the criminal pretends to be someone they are not in order to gain access to money or information. Sometimes they will say they represent some company or government entity. In spear phishing, the criminal will pose as someone the targeted victim actually knows.
- Data Breach – A breach is when the information within your business server, network, or computers is accessed by, or exposed to, an outside party. Your corporate, employee, or customer data is now available to criminals for exploitation.
- Malware and Denial of Service – These attacks are meant to disable your systems with either destructive software or traffic. While the criminals may not take anything, they could still destroy your business.
- Ransomware – Access to your devices or server is essentially kidnapped by criminals and held for a ransom. Until you pay for the systems to be unlocked, you will be blocked from using them. A ransomware attack happened in 2019 at Souderton Area School District, and it severely disabled many of the school’s systems and devices.
When these attacks happen, the results are often catastrophic to the business. The majority of small businesses cannot survive a single cyber attack. They lose income while the business is shut down after an attack, lose customers due to loss of faith, lose money in notifying customers and paying to rectify the situation, and lose business equipment. The costs easily grow into tens of thousands of dollars.
How Can I Protect My Business from Cyber Attacks?
There are two major ways to protect your business from digital crime. First, obtain Cyber Liability coverage from your insurance agent, and make sure you understand how the policy works. Second, institute best practices in your business to get everyone involved in protecting your data.
Cyber Liability coverage provides financial protection for your business and for the individuals who may be harmed in an attack. This coverage can help your business survive an attack by covering most of the costs involved in identifying the breach, notifying the victims, paying for credit monitoring, making ransom payments, restoring systems, and paying legal fees.
Instituting best cyber practices in your business helps you prevent an attack from ever happening at all. To get started with best practices on your own, try the following:
- Prohibit all non-work internet usage on company computers. The fewer websites employees use while working, the fewer opportunities they have to click on something they shouldn’t.
- Prohibit employees from accessing any company data from their smart phones, including emails. It is much easier to verify an incoming email address from a laptop or desktop than from a phone screen.
- Prohibit any company data from being shared on any kind of free platform. Paid subscriptions from reputable firms come with security features that help you protect data. Always vet the security of any workflow or data storage system you are considering.
Additionally, outside firms can run tests to determine both how protected your systems are and how attentive your employees are to potential threats.
What Should I Do if My Company Data Has Been Exposed?
If you suspect that your company has been exposed to a cyber attack, get help immediately. Never wait until morning or try to discover what happened on your own. The experts that you have 24/7 access to with your Cyber Liability coverage need to act on the breach right away if they have any chance of minimizing the damage. They will help you handle your responsibilities in the most prudent way to prevent the situation from getting worse.
It’s frightening to think of how quickly the business you’ve worked so hard to build could be destroyed by a cyber attack. If you have not yet researched Cyber Liability coverage, contact us. Smyrl Insurance has been helping to protect small businesses from all kinds of threats for over 65 years. We educate, nurture, and empower our clients to feel confident that they have the best protection for their business both physically and digitally. We serve clients for many types of business insurance, including General Liability and Cyber Liability in Hatfield, Lansdale, Souderton, Harleysville and throughout Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.
