Your customers are in a cybersecurity crisis, whether they know it or not. Cyber attacks are happening at the rate of 1 almost every 30 seconds, and the days of ransomware attacks where you could simply restore from your backups and forget about it are over. These days, the attackers are making copies of the data to blackmail your customers even if they can restore a local copy. Ransomware has evolved to lurk in the network and wait for the data restoration to start and then encrypt the backups.
Another major factor in this crisis is what is happening in the cyber insurance industry. Claims are climbing in both frequency and dollar amount, leading to increased scrutiny by adjusters looking for grounds to reject claims. Was there a known vulnerability left unpatched that could fall under a “failure to maintain” clause? Was the customer’s organization lacking 24/7 monitoring in violation of their agreement to meet their compliance requirements or “reasonable protections”? Even customers who have not made any claims are seeing steep increases in costs with reductions in limits or insurers no longer willing to provide cyber coverage at all.
There are three ways that you can immediately help your customers to reduce their cyber risk:
- Make them aware of the risks. It’s hard to believe that anyone does not hear about cyber attacks daily, but there are still many business owners and executives who don’t think it could happen to them. Very few know about the frequency of attacks, that so many go undetected, or that insurance may not just take care of it when an attack occurs.
- Help them to put detection in place for critical assets. In 2019, the average time to detect a threat was over six months, and it’s estimated that over half remain undetected. The best protection is immediate detection.
- Make sure they have access to incident response resources. Incident response is another area where customers assume that their insurance will provide help, but that is often not the case. We can tailor incident response retainers that even SMB customers can afford because not being able to access resources quickly in the heat of an incident is something they cannot afford to risk.
Remember, your Foresite team is here to help you have these conversations, assess the customer’s risk levels, and provided recommendations to help them minimize their exposure.
