Since 2008, the United States has lost an overall amount of more than $1.6 trillion due to data breaches alone. Even these figures may be on the low end of the real number lost, however, as these numbers rely on media reports and public records alone. Some states do not require data breach notification so in those states, we can only guess at the real amount of damages caused by data breach.
Almost 6,000,000,000 personal records have been exposed due to California breaches since 2008. Almost 300,000,000 have been exposed in each of New York and Texas due to data breaches.
Financial damages from data breaches are expected, but when viewed in the aggregate, the United States is losing a ton of its generated wealth due simply to data being exposed by cyber criminals. Small businesses are suffering and with it being prohibitively expensive to adequately defend against data breaches, managing, and containing them with cyber liability insurance may be the most cost effective and pragmatic course of action.
Small businesses can protect themselves from cyber attackers with cyber liability insurance
Colonial Surety includes cyber liability insurance with our ERISA fidelity bond packages with fiduciary liability insurance to best protect your company plan against a cyber attack.
Colonial’s cyber insurance provides a services-based solution to help plan sponsors manage data breaches successfully. These services include a dedicated team of cyber breach professionals who assist plan sponsors at every stage of incident investigation and breach response. These professionals coordinate the carefully vetted forensics experts and specialized lawyers to help plan sponsors establish what’s been compromised; assess plan sponsor responsibility; and, notify those individuals affected. In addition, these services will also coordinate credit or identity monitoring, and PR advice to help the plan sponsor safeguard its reputation. Of course, Colonial’s cyber insurance also indemnifies and defends plan sponsors from covered lawsuits or regulatory actions, the risk of which may be reduced by a well-coordinated breach response, but can never be completely eliminated.
Ongoing governance and evaluation of recordkeepers can help protect data, but the only way to fully protect against a potential cyber attack’s data breach is to purchase cyber liability insurance from Colonial Surety Company.