Cyber for Plan Sponsors

Who’s Behind Data Breaches?

07.02.2019

When you’re implementing data breach and cyber attack protections, you’re probably thinking about agents from the outside trying to hack your system and expose your company’s sensitive data. But those are not the only people trying to gain access to your data.

While 69% of attacks are committed by outsiders, 34% of data breaches involve internal actors. That means that over a third of attacks involve people involved in your company who probably have done research on and have knowledge of your cybersecurity measures. Even company partners were involved in 2% of data breaches. Five percent of breaches involved multiple parties.

Organized criminal groups were behind 39% of all data breaches, meaning that a majority of attacks likely weren’t committed by famous organizations you have to watch for. There are likely smaller groups or individual actors that are committing these crimes who are harder to watch out for. Over 20% of cyber data breaches involved state-affiliated actors as well.

With all these different groups committing data breaches, it gets harder and harder to effectively prevent all of them from hacking your system and exposing your data. The more effective method is to contain and manage breaches with cyber liability insurance.

How can you best manage and contain cyber attacks? Cyber liability insurance!

Colonial Surety offers an included cyber liability insurance endorsement for our ERISA fidelity bond packages with fiduciary liability insurance to best protect your 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.