The United States doesn’t have a national regulatory system for governing cybersecurity. There’s no consensus framework in the country for evaluating the effectiveness of cyber protections. Based on the available information, it seems as if any cyber protections could be broken by dedicated enough cyber attackers. So what can you do?
Plan sponsors and others included with a retirement plan can be in charge of personal data of all plan participants and be tasked with guarding that information from cyber attacks and data breaches that just keep increasing in number. Phishing emails, malware and virus attacks, and identity theft are becoming far more prevalent and dangerous threats to plan participants and that could leave you and your company vulnerable. The SPARK institute has come up with a flexible way of evaluating cyber security protections beyond simply seeing whether a plan is victim to an attack, but even that is far from full proof.
The only way to guarantee that you and your company are covered in the case of a cyber attack is cyber liability insurance.
Where can I easily purchase cyber liability insurance to protect my company and retirement plan?
Colonial Surety includes cyber liability insurance with our ERISA fidelity bond packages with fiduciary liability insurance to best protect your company and 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.