Cyber liability insurance interest spikes following major data breaches

Cyber Insurance industry popularity

Recent news headlines from large trusted companies such as Target and Kickstarter have caused serious worry.

With a steady stream of data breaches at major corporations continually making recent news, the need for cyber liability insurance has become much clearer and companies are starting to take action by buying at a higher rate than they have done in the recent past.

Businesses are starting to realize that nobody is really safe against a determined online criminal.

Cyber liability Insurance popularityTarget recently revealed that hackers had broken into their files and had stolen the credit and debit card numbers of 40 million customers and that the email addresses, mailing addresses and PINs of another 70 million people had also been stolen. Just as that headline was starting to fade from interest, Kickstarter announced that it had been the victim of its own cyber attack.

The importance of cyber liability insurance is suddenly becoming all too real for companies.

These latest headlines appear to have been the encouragement that many American businesses needed to buy the insurance coverage that they need against the associated expenses from a data breach or for losing customer information of a sensitive nature.

It has been estimated by Marsh LLC – an insurance brokerage firm in New York that conducts tracking in that market – that one in every three companies has now purchased liability coverage against data breaches and their associated losses. Last year, those policies were being sold to 20 percent more hospitals, banks, retailers, and other companies than they had the year before.

The coverage has been around for about ten years now, but it is only now making its way into mainstream forms of business policies. When it was first created, it was seen only as a type of luxury coverage for companies that were responding to a series of data breaches that were making national and global headlines and that came with recovery costs of millions of dollars.

Since then, it has become clear that cyber criminals aren’t targeting only one kind of company, and it doesn’t seem to matter how many security precautions are in place, everybody is at some level of risk. Because of this, companies are now adding cyber liability coverage to their package of other policies that protect them against the costly risks that they face in doing business.

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