Business cyber insurance: A sea change

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SMALL-BUSINESS COMPUTING By Amy Babinchak For IT businesses — and by extension, their clients — adapting to a rapidly shifting technology
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Good points on business cyber insurance. Do consumers need to purchase any form of cyber insurance?

Nathan Parker

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It would have been useful to be told at the start of the article just how much of what followed was US-SPECIFIC, without general applicability to the rest of the world.

Please could such articles bear in mind that “other countries are available”, which may do things differently…!

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

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I answered Nathan’s question above ( #2312150 ) once already and my comment was deleted without any obvious reason for that.

My comment, in essence, was that, in my opinion, one should consider the following before buying cyber insurance:

The cost of insurance vs. the likely cost of having one’s data stolen or even rendered inaccessible unless one pays a substantial ransom.

The cost of insurance vs. the cost of buying a new machine is the one now in use were to be attacked in a way that makes it useless.

Finally, whether to buy insurance is better than to keep up to date backups of one data and use some antimalware protection, such as good anti virus.

I would add to the above: the reputation of the insurer.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV

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Nathan Parker

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You have not answered the question “do consumers need cyber insurance”.

I would say they do not.

1. Data loss for consumers is annoying and may cause a few problems, but it will not affect your income / reputation.
2. Fixing the problem will cost time, but it is your own and you are not being paid for it.
3. Insurance companies may require proof of data protection measures used. By the time you have done that you have protected yourself against malware.
4. Backing up to an external device is always the most cost effective security and recent backup utilities have ransomware protection in the paid versions.

cheers, Paul

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Nathan Parker

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Good points. I also use online backup as an additional insurance against my critical data.

Nathan Parker

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