Would Your Business Recover After a Cyberattack?
Key takeaways
- October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, a good time for business owners in Maryland, DC and Virginia to check their cyber plan.
- A cyberattack can affect a business in several ways at once: downtime, recovery costs, legal and regulatory costs, and customer trust.
- General liability policies usually do not respond to cyber losses, which is why cyber coverage is typically a separate policy.
- Cyber policies vary widely, so the coverage details and the security questions on the application both matter.
October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and it is a good moment for every business owner to ask one simple question: if a cyberattack hit tomorrow, how would we get back on our feet? The short video below walks through how an attack can affect a business, from lost revenue to fines. It runs about a minute and is worth sharing with your leadership team.
Watch the one-minute video
What a cyberattack can mean for a business
For most of the businesses we work with across Gaithersburg and the DC metro, the cost of an attack rarely shows up as one bill. It tends to arrive in several pieces:
- Downtime and lost revenue while systems, email and files are restored.
- Response and recovery costs, such as forensic investigators, data restoration and notifying affected customers.
- Legal and regulatory costs, including fines and penalties where they apply and are insurable.
- Customer trust, which can take longer to rebuild than any system.
Where cyber insurance fits
A cyber liability policy is built to help with many of these costs, but no two policies are written the same way. Coverage limits, waiting periods, exclusions and the security controls a carrier expects can all change how a claim plays out. That is why we look at the fine print with you, not just the premium.
If it has been a while since you reviewed your cyber coverage, or you are not sure you have it at all, this month is a good time for a conversation. Our team is happy to walk through what you have and where the gaps might be. Learn more about cyber liability coverage from Capitol Benefits.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do small businesses need cyber insurance?
Cyberattacks affect businesses of every size, and smaller businesses often have fewer resources to absorb downtime or the cost of responding to a breach. Whether a policy makes sense depends on the data you hold and how much your operations rely on technology, which is a good conversation to have with an advisor.
Does general liability insurance cover a cyberattack?
Usually not. Most general liability policies exclude or sharply limit data breach and cyber losses, which is why cyber coverage is typically written as its own policy. It is worth checking your current policies to see exactly what they say.
What does a cyber insurance application ask about?
Carriers commonly ask about security controls such as multifactor authentication, backups, endpoint protection and how your team would respond to an incident. We cover this in more detail in our post on the cyber insurance application.
Not sure what your cyber policy actually covers?
Send us your current declarations and we will read the endorsements, triggers and exclusions with you, then quote against what we find.
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