Cyber liability webinar: risks and opportunities

Because cyber exploits are heightened during the common work from home (WFH) arrangements during Covid19, we’re making our recent cyber liability webinar publicly available. This webinar is important to agents for two reasons:

It offers concrete information to help you secure your agency operations as you and your team WFH.
Most importantly, it offers information about why this coverage is vital to your clients and the perfect account rounding coverage.

The webinar was presented by Anjali Johnson, Vice President, Cyber at Highland Risk. Our own Michael Sabbagh Director of Commercial Lines Placing, assists with fielding questions after Anjali’s presentation.

Cyber liability webinar: risks

Anjeli presents five common real-word threats that are being employed and re-engineered to exploit our current WFH environment, along with 3 key controls that you and your clients can employ to harden against such exploits. These include:

Multi Factor Authentication on all devices, and specifically for connections to the corporate network and email.
Password Managers, which manage and encrypt your passwords.
Secure Virtual Private Networks (SSL VPNs), which offer secure communication between the remote user and a corporate network.

She also runs through her recommended list of basic security Dos and Don’ts.

Cyber liability webinar: opportunities

One of the important recommendations for any business is to have good cyber insurance – one with strong first party coverage, where 90% of the losses occur. Presenting cyber insurance to commercial clients offers a significant growth opportunity for agents, while providing a vital service to insureds. Cyber insurance will not just provide protection against losses, it will also offer risk management and incident response services that will help to minimize any losses. In the questions and answer period, Anjeli and Mike fielded some of the common myths that sometimes stand in the way of a sale:

The risk/liability is borne by a third party, such as an IT firm or the cloud service where data is stored. No, these services have limited liability specified in contracts. Costs for notification of regulators and clients, investigations, fees and penalties, and more all fall with the business
Coverage is available through BOPS or other existing coverage. Usually such coverage is narrow in scope and does not cover first party costs. Providers typically do not have the expertise for incident response.
The business is too small to need coverage, or it doesn’t collect data or payments. In reality, small businesses that have less security are common and attractive targets for cyber criminals.

In closing, Anjeli discusses benefits and advantages of the particular and exclusive cyber insurance package available to Renaissance Alliance members.