In late October, Dyn—a cloud-based internet performance management (IPM) company in the United States—had its server infrastructure compromised following distributed denial-of-service (DDos) attacks.
In essence, DDos attacks work by overwhelming targeted machines and servers with junk traffic, often causing website crashes. In this case, the attacks disrupted popular sites like Twitter, Spotify, Netflix and Amazon.
While DDos attacks are common, experts are concerned at their growing effectiveness, as Dyn is a large firm that services many Fortune 500 companies. It’s clear that cyber attacks are becoming more and more sophisticated, and hackers are no longer simply IT-student pranksters, but rather nation states and other large entities with malicious agendas.
Because of this fact, the looming threat of a cyber attack is more a matter of when than if, and businesses will need to turn to cyber liability insurance for the necessary protection. What’s more, as a reliance on cloud services becomes increasingly important for successful business operations, the value of a strong cyber liability insurance policy will only continue to grow.
A typical cyber liability policy can help protect you from costs associated with a data breach, copyright or trademark infringement, data loss due to hacking and business interruption.
For additional protection, it’s critical that you create a formal, documented risk management plan that addresses the scope, roles, responsibilities, compliance criteria and methodology for performing cyber risk assessments. This plan should include a description of all systems used at the organization based on their importance to the organization, and the data stored and processed within them.
Experts recommend that businesses review their cyber risk plans on an annual basis and update them whenever there are significant changes to their information systems or the facilities where systems are stored, or other conditions occur that may impact the organization.
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