Over the past few weeks, we have outlined six crucial steps for defending against ransomware attacks. Our latest blog post discusses the importance of Cyber Insurance, a growing consideration for many organizations. Due to the frequency and increasing costs associated with ransomware attacks, cyber insurance underwriters have suffered significant losses over the past few years. As a result, obtaining a policy has become more challenging and expensive, and if an attack does occur, receiving a payout based on an existing policy has become much more difficult. However, cyber insurance remains a viable method for transferring ransomware risk, provided you are well-prepared. To ensure success, keep these critical practices in mind.
- Conduct a thorough risk assessment: Before purchasing cyber insurance, you must comprehensively evaluate your organization’s cyber risks. Identify potential vulnerabilities, assess the impact of a cyber incident, and evaluate your current security measures. This will help you define your insurance strategy and coverage needs. With the rising cost of a policy, you do not want to over-purchase, while at the same time, with the cost of attacks going up, you want to ensure you have the correct amount of coverage.
- Understand your policy coverage: Review your cyber insurance policy’s terms, conditions, and coverage limits. Policies may cover ransomware attack risks like system loss and business disruptions. Still, the policy may not cover the cost of data exposure and privacy violation penalties due to cyber extortion. Ensure the policy adequately covers the potential financial, business, and reputational impact of different types of ransomware attacks your organization may face.
- Implement strong cybersecurity measures (the ones we have discussed in this blog series): Insurance underwriters will assess an organization’s cybersecurity posture before providing coverage. To demonstrate your commitment to cyber risk management, implement robust security measures such as firewalls, network defenses, employee training programs, incident response plans, and regular security audits. Proving adequate security controls will help you get the coverage you need and lower your insurance premiums.
- Regularly review and update coverage: Ransomware attack threats and tactics constantly evolve, so it’s crucial to review and update your cyber insurance coverage regularly. This goes for all cyber insurance policies covering all types of cyberattack risks. Remember to include changes in your organization, locations, business models and IT systems as well. Assess whether your existing coverage adequately addresses new risks and consider adjusting your policy limits or obtaining additional coverage as needed.
- Maintain reports and records: Document all cybersecurity measures, control effectiveness reports, risk assessments, and incident response activities. These actions and activities will be invaluable during the claims process, helping to demonstrate your organization’s adherence to best practices and optimize your payout.
- Evaluate third-party risk: Assess the cybersecurity practices of your vendors, suppliers, and partners, as their security posture can directly impact your organization’s cyber risk. Understand whether your cyber insurance policy covers third-party incidents and consider adding endorsements or separate coverage if necessary. The most recent MoveIT attacks against many customers of Progress Software show just how vulnerable anyone can be. How many organizations have insurance policies covering this type of software supply chain exploit leading to hundreds of successful ransomware attacks?
- Review contractual obligations: If you work with third parties or subcontractors, review your contracts to ensure they have adequate cybersecurity measures and insurance coverage in place. This can help protect your organization from potential liabilities arising from their actions or inactions.
With that, we end our blog series, “Seven Critical Steps to Defeating Ransomware in 2023,” we highly recommend reading through all of them if you haven’t already. And if you have, we encourage you to keep them in mind for future reference:
Secure and Monitor VPN Activity
Monitor and Protect Your Network
Or download the entire blog set in our new whitepaper here.
To learn more, reach out to CyGlass:
www.cyglass.com/solutions-ransomware-defense
Bill Munroe
VP of Marketing, CyGlass
