Years of History Gone in Minutes – Why You Cannot Afford To Ignore Cyber Crime.

You’ve worked hard to establish your business.  A lot of blood, sweat and tears have gone into creating its success and you deserve it.  So, what gives someone – out to make a fast buck -the right to take it all away from you?

I recently worked on a claim involving a manufacturing company which was the victim of a cyber attack.   A weak password which easily gave way to a brute force attack which enabled the hacker to access their systems and put encryption software on their servers with a ransom note demanding a bitcoin payment for the decryption key.

This company has a lot of machinery, it is not state of the art industry 4.0 machinery and so is not on a network.  However, there is one machine that is and that is their printer which is their only way of printing the necessary information on the packaging of the various products.

Technically, production was unaffected as they were still able to make their products, however, with no printer they were in danger of creating a huge stock of packaged but unlabelled products which couldn’t be sold.  The labels couldn’t be added retrospectively as once sealed, it was impossible to tell what the contents of the packages were.

They had some finished stock, however, their IT systems controlled their transportation activity, their sales orders and invoicing as well as the general day-to-day tasks.  As a result, they couldn’t transport the existing stock.

Part of the back up was on a local server and was useless.

The insurer was notified and they set to work negotiating with the hacker and paid the ransom to obtain the decryption key.

Their business was interrupted for 3 days.

The total claim settlement paid was £67,000.

It is worth noting that some decryption keys are worthless plus if you pay the ransom to a sanctioned organisation, you can go to prison and ignorance is not a defence.

Specialist cyber insurers are essential.

I know that you have physical protections on your premises to deter intruders from stealing your IT equipment and you also insure it against theft.

You have a level of cyber security in place to help prevent a cyberattack, however, you don’t insure against that.

You are now 11 times more likely to be the victim of a cyberattack than a physical burglary which makes cyber insurance a vital part of your insurance programme.

As a company with a multimillion-pound turnover, the cost of a cyber insurance policy equates to approximately 0.1% of your turnover.

Why would you risk potentially losing your business and its reputation?

Hundreds of years, gone in minutes, just because you didn’t think a cyber-attack would happen to you.

I help manufacturing and engineering firms de-risk their business by making sure they have the right type of policy in place. I appreciate every business is different and I spend time understanding how they operate, what their current policy covers, where their gaps are and where they simply should not take a risk.

Get in touch for some advice that can help you and your business.