Why buy Cyber Liability Insurance?

The True Numbers behind Data Breaches – 75-50-75!

The bottom line is: If you own a retail store or restaurant that accepts credit cards (Do you know any that don’t?) then you owe it to yourself to spend 13 minutes watching this video! This might be the most important thing you can do to protect yourself against data theft and associated PCI fines that could put you right out of business. Like they say, it is what you don’t know that can hurt you.

In the video they talk about insuring that your Point of Sale System, POS, is compliant with the Payment Application Best Practices, PABP, put out by VISA and last revised in February 2012. In this document they list Payment Application Vendors and the validated PABP versions. You should check this list for the vendor of your POS. If nothing else you should at least have the conversation with you vendor to insure that magnetic stripe data, CW2, Pin Blocks from the cards are not stored anywhere in your system. If that data is stored on your system you should find out what file(s) it is in and remove it from your hard drive. That is the information that will get you in serious trouble if compromised. Remember, if you don’t need the data for a business practice, then don’t store it. It is permissible to store the Cardholder’s Name, Primary Account Information, Expiration date and Service Code, but these need to be stored using PCI DSS.

Did you know that 24% of all data breaches affect retail environments and restaurants? (Source: 2013 Verizon Data Breach Report)

"Unsafe links appear to be shortcuts to funny videos, shocking news stories, awesome deals, or “Like” buttons, but are really designed to steal your personal information or hijack your computer."

 - PCWorld

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Recently, this email arrived in my email box from the head of our IT Department:

How will I know I have had a data breach?

Developing a data breach Incident Response Plan, IRP – the first step needed to obtain Cyber Liability Insurance.

I hope by now that my admonitions to you to prepare in advance for a data breach have sunk in, so you and your data breach team will be well prepared for this moment. However, I would like to emphasize that rather than calling your forensic analysts first - that you call your attorney first. There is a simple reason for this in that information provided to your attorney is protected by client privilege rules, whereas all other vendors that you might use and share information with will be subject to disclosure in the case of a lawsuit.

For those of you that missed my Cyber Liability presentation last week at Cabela’s in Dundee, MI last Wednesday, here is your chance to review the MS PowerPoint slides I used to present the class. The class was well attended by 75 licensed insurance agents from around SE Michigan. Attendees earned 3 Continuing Education, CE, credits for attending. If you need CE credits and would be interested in another presentation please send me your email address and I will put you on the list to be notified when my next class will take place. I suspect we will have one in the spring somewhere in SE Michigan. I believe the class was well received by most everyone that attended and I actually still had my voice after speaking for almost 3 hours straight!