How do I know if my business has a cyber risk?

Cyber crime is a growing problem around the world, and UK businesses are not immune. According to the Government’s 2022 Cyber Security Breaches Survey¹, 39% of UK businesses reported a cyber attack in the previous 12 months. The most common type was phishing (89%).

It is important to understand what questions you need to ask to ascertain your level of cyber exposure. A company that handles financial transactions or stores sensitive personal information could be more vulnerable than one which has no sensitive information, for instance. But, a company that has little data and instead relies heavily on technology to generate revenue could be more vulnerable than data heavy organisations.

No matter how much a company invests in IT security, it will never be 100% safe. Below are some key questions you must ask to understand the cyber exposures your business faces, and whether a cyber insurance policy is right for you.

Is my business exposed to cyber risk?

1. What type of data do we hold?
   Is personal and corporate data controlled or processed by your business, and could a data breach lead to third-party liability?
2. If we cannot access our data, does this impact our business?
   If it became impossible to access certain data, would business-as-usual be affected?
3. How does our business make money?
   Will there be an impact on our income or additional costs incurred if our systems go down?
4. Do we rely on third parties that use technology or hold our data?
   If a third party we contract with is impacted by a cyber incident, is there a risk that it will impact our data or cause an outage which impacts our ability to operate?
5. Do our people expose us to human error?
   Researchers from Stanford University² discovered that 88% of successful cyber attacks are the result of human error.

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, your business has a cyber risk and it is important you understand the severity of these exposures should the worst happen.

How can Howden help?

Our analytics platform provides an ecosystem of data, signals and models to aid your cyber risk quantification of the above scenarios. Whilst traditional benchmarking can aid decisions based on the buying actions of peers, we can reflect your loss exposures against your peer group and their corresponding buying patterns. To do this, we will run a financial loss model to assist you in understanding your financial exposure to potential cyber risk such as ransomware. We will use your revenue and industry to refine and tailor the loss distribution and then run a simulation of 50,000 events. The model will organise the distribution of results to formulate the percentile of loss and associated cost breakdown. The output of this exercise will ensure you can prioritise your cyber risk, align the analysis with your organisation’s strategic goals and, if you choose to purchase insurance, agree a purchasing strategy ahead of any market engagement. 

 

 

 

Our Cyber & Technology Solutions team in London has over 30 specialists with a combined experience of 200 + years. We act for over 2,000+ clients across a multitude of industries and are responsible for in excess of £250m premium into the London market annually.

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1) https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/cyber-security-breaches-survey-2022/cyber-security-breaches-survey-2022 

2) https://blog.knowbe4.com/88-percent-of-data-breaches-are-caused-by-human-error#