Do you have cyber liability insurance to protect you against data breaches and email scams?
The modern business faces new risks, and a lot of them are digital.
One of the best examples we can give is the ongoing business email compromise (BEC) scam. In 2014, 1,198 US businesses fell victim to this scam, costing $179,755,367.08 according to the FBI.
The BEC scam can take on a few forms. In the first, a thief mimics a certain business’s longtime supplier and requests that a fraudulent invoice be fulfilled by wiring money to an alternate account. Oftentimes, the thief will get close enough to the actual supplier’s email address and usual invoice format businesses will not notice the request is a fraud until it’s too late.
In other instances, an email account at the actual supplier is hacked and invoices are sent from that address requesting money be wired to an alternate account. The third form this scam can take is that one of your own employee email accounts is hacked and money is requested from your vendors or clients.
In each instance, the result is the same. Innocent businesses get scammed out of large sums of money.
On top of email scams, businesses also need to consider the possibility of data breaches. While major hacks at Target and Home Depot have brought this issue to the forefront of national attention, one in three data breaches occurs in a business with under 100 employees. Tragically, 60 percent of those small businesses close within six months of the breach.
The good news is that cyber liability insurance can help protect you against these very real risks. If you become the victim of an email scam or data breach, this policy can cover the majority of the costs to your business. To put the right cyber liability insurance policy in place for your business’s specific exposures, contact Hoffman Brown Company in Sherman Oaks, California today!
