- Do you accept payment by check or credit card?
- Do you have a website or use e-mail?
- Do you have employees or collect PII or HIPPA protected information on customers?
- Do you hire vendors for help with any of the issues mentioned in the first 3 questions?
If you answered yes to any of these questions then you need cyber liability protection and here's why:
- If you accept payment by check or credit card you have private financial information on your clients and could be held responsible for data breaches that expose that information. Your Payment Card Industry (PCI) contracts with your credit card services provider now makes you responsible for data breach. If you don't take credit cards but do take checks you slightly less risk but still could have your bank deposits including customer checks physically stolen. Believe it or not but the data breach protection in most cyber liability policies will cover these types of 'paper' breaches as well.
- If you have a website or use e-mail you probably go to great expense to keep those platforms virus free but if your IT staff and anti-virus programs miss something you could be accused of inadvertently spreading malicious code. If that code causes loss to another party, you could be held responsible.
- Employees files and payroll systems as well as many business' client files include Personally Identifiable Information (PII) or protected health information. The data requiring protection varies from State to State and country to country and you must meet the requirements of the jurisdiction each of your clients resides in. Some PII examples include full name, social security number, driver's license number address, biometric data including photographs, etc.
- Many companies outsource the types of activities we've described so far in order to reduce risk, I have vendors that help my agency with payroll, payment processing, website maintenance, and e-mail. If one of these companies have a breach I could also be held responsible from the financial or other damages my client, employee, e-mail recipient or random person accessing my website suffers.
You may think that your business is not an attractive target for cyber criminals but the past few years have seen an increase in attacks on small and medium size businesses because cybercriminals find them easier to penetrate and there is less law enforcement pressure following those breaches.
One final reason to consider cyber liability protection for your business is the significant increase in ransomware attacks we've seen in the past year.
