Do you know the difference between cybersecurity and cyber insurance? Most people don’t, leaving thousands of organizations left vulnerable.
What is Cybersecurity?
Cybersecurity is the practice of protecting systems, networks, and programs for digital attacks. In other words, the act of predicting, preventing, defending, detecting, and responding to malicious attacks. Hackers are constantly on the hunt to access, change, or destroy sensitive information, as well as the intention to interrupt normal business operation, or the extortion of money. Without the correct protection in place, your organization’s most confidential information is left vulnerable.
What is Cyber Insurance?
Cyber insurance is intended to provide services after a malicious attack is made. Cyber insurance generally covers fees and expenses involved in a breach; some policies include claims for ransomware. When ransomware attacks a network, there is usually two options; pay the ransom or restore from backups. What happens when you have no backups in place and insurance won’t pay for the full ransom? Cyber insurance does absolutely nothing to protect your sensitive data and information.
Cyber insurance leaves your system and data vulnerable to malicious actors.
As you can see, there is a major difference between cybersecurity and cyber insurance that is commonly misunderstood. It is critical that organizations have the correct protection and backups in place to prevent disasters from happening in the first place.
Without the proper protection in place, you and your customers are left with many threats and risks. Here are a few examples:
- Ransomware
- Phishing
- Data Leakage
- Hacking
- Password Attacks
- Malware
Each attack listed above could leave your operations down for days, or possibly even weeks. These attacks can leave you unable to accept payments, leak your confidential customer information, and if you do not have information backups in place, all of your data could be gone in an instant. Cyber insurance does not prevent any of these attacks from occurring, leaving you entirely vulnerable. Cybersecurity is taking preventative measures to secure your organization and tends to be cheaper than cyber insurance. These malicious attacks can be prevented, demolishing the need for insurance in the first place. It is smarter to be proactive, rather than reactive.
What do we recommend?
IronTech Security recommends that your organization invests in cybersecurity solutions. We believe these are some of the most critical solutions:
- MEDR (Managed Endpoint Detect & Respond)
- MEDR is a tool used to secure endpoints by detecting malicious activities with real-time continuous monitoring, allowing us to respond to incidents as they occur.
- Backup & Disaster Recovery
- Backup and disaster recovery is the act of storing files and data to a separate location so that in an event that the files or data is lost or damaged, they can be restored fully. Disaster recovery is the act of restoring files and data.
- Continuous Cybersecurity Awareness Training
- Continuous cybersecurity awareness training is critical for management and employees. Hackers are becoming smarter every single day, leaving one-and-done trainings meaningless. Everyone in the organization need to be aware of current threats and risks, as well as what to be on the lookout for. You are only as strong as your weakest link.
- Password Management
- Password attacks occur because many people re-use the same password on multiple different platforms. Password managers make it easy to use a unique and strong password for every account. We recommend 1Password!
Do not be left vulnerable to hundreds of threats and risks by not having the right protection in place. Understand the difference between cybersecurity and cyber insurance, choose the best option for your organization. Remember that cyber-attacks are preventable, do not leave your customer data vulnerable to malicious actors.
