Cyber for Plan Sponsors

Data Breach Costs Often Felt 2 or More Years After Hack

07.16.2019

Cyber attacks can cause large amounts of sensitive and valuable data to be exposed via hackers. But cyber attack effects do not end as soon as the data is exposed soon after the attack. The costs can be felt for two or more years after the event.

People often focus on the initial cyber attack costs such as technical investigations and breach containment, but there are costs to customers that go beyond that and can greatly hurt your business if you do not identify and contain a data breach quickly.

A cyber attack can ultimately cause insurance premiums to customers to increase, increase the cost to raise debt, cause operational disruption, lose contracts with third parties, cause devaluation of your company name, and more. All of those are not direct results of the cyber attack but cause damage to a company for years that can ultimately run your company out of business.

The best thing a company can do is identify, manage and contain a data breach quickly to reduce long term business harming costs.

Businesses can manage and contain data breaches 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.