The company has acknowledged the growing need for coverage and is now selling to business customers.
If there is anything that can be agreed upon by virtually every business that uses a computer (are there any out there that don’t have at least one?), it is that the threat of a data breach or of being hacked and having information is high, and that cyber insurance could provide some protection.
With this knowledge, and the increasing popularity of the coverage, Chubb has jumped on the bandwagon and is selling.
Data released by many different organizations – both cyber insurance companies and market analyst firms – has revealed that the coverage is in extremely high demand at the moment. Now, Chubb Group of Insurance Companies is offering its own policies to customers, in addition to an incident response plan template by way of eRisk Hub®, which is the portal for its web-based risk management.
Cyber insurance is becoming recognized as critical against the ever looming threat of data breaches.
According to the vice president and worldwide cyber security manager at Chubb, Ken Goldstein, “Our research has shown that only about one-third of private companies have an incident response plan for data breaches.”
Goldstein pointed out that it is often the small businesses that can benefit the most from this type of protection. Smaller businesses often wonder what benefit cyber insurance can provide them, and if they are really at risk, as many believe that it is the larger companies that are being targeted. However, as a growing number of smaller businesses find themselves victims of cyberattacks of different forms, they are also discovering that they don’t have their own plans in place to manage the potential devastation that can be caused.
According to Goldstein, “Many small businesses may not have the resources or expertise to develop such a plan, leaving them exposed to the disruption of a data breach and costly first-party expenses, legal ramifications, and regulatory fines and penalties.”
The results of a 2013 Cost of a Data Breach Study by Ponemon Institute helped to bring home the importance of cyber insurance by revealing that the average expense associated with every compromised record in a data breach is $188. It also showed that this figure can be reduced by $42 per record when an effective response plan is in place.
