31 July 2020 • 4 min read

Relevance of Cyber Insurance in a changing world

The novel coronavirus has triggered an undeniable shift in the dimensions of the cyber threat landscape for companies and continues to disrupt normal industry operations. It has become the single best event to leverage cyber-attacks from, creating an ideal environment for skilled to opportunistic hackers to exploit the situation. The...

Ryan van de Coolwijk

Ryan van de Coolwijk

The novel coronavirus has triggered an undeniable shift in the dimensions of the cyber threat landscape for companies and continues to disrupt normal industry operations. It has become the single best event to leverage cyber-attacks from, creating an ideal environment for skilled to opportunistic hackers to exploit the situation.

The pandemic has potentially forever changed our daily lives, forcing some major changes in today’s modern workforce and pushing companies to adopt different operational methods.

With the initial lockdown procedures we were forced to, where possible work from home. For many of us this was the first time and exposed us to:

  • Adjusting to new distractions at home,
  • Getting used to using new technology and applications,
  • An uncertain world where we were on the lookout for updated information

Coupled to this, many companies were forced to increase capacity to support a remote workforce in very short time-frames.

This put IT teams as well as employees under increased pressure in uncertain times. For many this meant not being as vigilant as normal. At the same time, we also saw an unprecedented rise in the number of attacks leveraging COVID-19. Cybercriminals are striking when countries are in the peak of the pandemic and citizens are looking for health information online. According to new research from Microsoft, every country in the world has seen at least one COVID-19 themed attack.

There are a considerable number of recently registered malicious domains on the Internet that contain the terms: “coronavirus”, “corona-virus”, “covid19” and “covid-19”, proof that hackers are taking advantage of the widespread global communications on the coronavirus to mask their malicious activities, from phishing attacks to malicious websites, scams and cyber-attacks targeting commonly used platforms.

With the relaxing of the lockdown measures we are again seeing a disruption to the norm as companies begin operating again, although generally under different circumstances than they would typically be accustomed to. While many companies were looking at cloud migrations and remote workforces, this work place evolution has been compressed from a couple years to a couple months. For employees this also poses new challenges due to:

  • Having to adjust to disparate working environments, home vs the office,
  • Concerns on safety and how to enforce social distancing,
  • Lets be honest masks are not overly comfortable,
  • Concerns around the safety of family and friends

IT teams are also having to provide support both for remote and onsite employees.

The New Norm

Remote working and online engagement are no longer a nice to have but an essential way of operating. There are likely to become a permanent feature of the ‘new normal’ after the COVID-19 pandemic.

This has given rise to a new emerging wave of cyber attacks leveraging the return to the office concerns and complexities.

Protecting your business from cyber threats, get an expert on your side

iTOO Cyber Insurance provides your business with access to expert knowledge and resources to effectively manage and recover from a cyber incident. Our comprehensive cyber insurance policy can be tailored to your requirements and provides the following coverages:

Evolving threat of Cyber crime

Cybercriminals show no ethical boundaries and will continue to attack wherever there is a vulnerability. They are more organised, and operating more like “real” businesses.

  • Hacking is indiscriminate, no matter your size or industry you are exposed to indiscriminate hacking attacks such as ransomware,
  • No security is infallible, even the large technology vendors admit that their solutions while they add value are not a silver bullet to not getting hacked,
  • Disgruntled staff and accidents can trigger an incident, think about a lost memory stick, errant email or the like,
  • Can’t pass the buck, you remain the data custodian. Even if you have outsourced IT or moved to the cloud, once data has been entrusted to you, you remain responsible for it and clients are going to hold you and not your service provider liable,
  • Damages can be significant and directors are exposed,
  • Effective incident response is key,
  • Cyber-crime is on the rise and SA is not immune

Click here for tips to protect yourself while working remotely.

Cyber insurance is far broader that the name implies. Our policy extends to cover numerous incidents including but not limited to:

  • Cyber extortion and malware (viruses, ransomware, or publishing of stolen data),
  • Denial of service (disruption to operations),
  • Downstream attack (a compromise of your environment resulting in damages to others),
  • Insider and privilege misuse (unauthorised access and use of systems and data by employees and service providers),
  • Physical theft and loss (both devices and physical hard copy data),
  • Threats posed by third party access into a client environment

The iTOO cyber insurance policy covers what has previously been uninsurable providing comprehensive first and third-party coverages with an expert incident response process.  To learn more visit our website.

For more information contact either Ryan van de Coolwijk at ryanv@itoo.co.za, Candice Sutherland candices@itoo.co.za or Lwando Cwane at LwandoC@itoo.co.za to assist you.