Cyber Liability – Is your website infected?

As though there weren’t enough problems, websites can be compromised, becoming sources of computer virus infection for your clients. Talk with us about #CyberLiability and #DataBreach insurance. 1-800-548-2329.

Google’s survey says there are many more compromised legitimate sites than there are sites designed to spread malware.  Click here for a commentary from our client IT Radix and access to the Google Malware Dashboard.

Once a legitimate site is compromised, all the unpleasant things you’ve heard of start happening: malware recording your entries or your clients’ entries, spreading viruses, and so on.  Your site is likely to be black listed by search engines.  It takes a long time and a lot of work to come back from that.

As soon as IT Radix scared us with this topic, we ran out to their suggested screening site  http://sitecheck.sucuri.net/scanner/ and checked our sites.  Everything was fine, today.  Our site providers keep track of this, but with the damage that we could face, it’s important to keep checking, and to keep our insurance in place.

Who owns your company’s data? How do you make sure?

You own your data, but you have to take steps to make sure you can control it, both legally and in the cyber world.

Do your employees use only devices your company owns?
Have they acknowledged that their information on those devices is not private?

If they use their own devices to access your information, have they agreed to let you review any and all information on those devices?
Have they agreed to let you wipe their devices if you find your information on them?

All of this should involve help from your own lawyer.

Even if you get a signed acknowledgement that you can look at their information and look at information on devices they own, you’d better be talking to your own lawyer if you run into a communication between your employee and his or her own attorney.

On the IT front, a good IT provider can help erect barriers to penetration by outsiders, and to theft of data by insiders.

But multiple platforms are complicating IT.  Mobile malware is exploding.  And many small businesses don’t keep current with firewalls and monitoring of data use.

If you’d like to discuss IT issues in more depth, try this link to IT Radix.  And we thank them for putting on the seminar that provoked many of these questions today.

The legal questions in the seminar today were posed by Colin Page, Esq.  Try this link to make contact with his law firm if you have questions on data ownership and employment issues.

Can Cyber liability or data breach destroy your company?

Yes it can.  Losing customer information can sink your company.

In the case cited in the linked Risk and Insurance article below, a medical records company suffered a burglary (not a hack, a burglary).  They lost certainty that 14,000 patient records were secure, and went out of business ahead of the wave of lawsuits.

For more information, look at other pages in our blog, or click here for connection to our web site page about Cyber Liability/Data Breach or lost record insurance.

Link to Risk and Insurance article

Social media liability risks

Here are some comments from Travelers Insurance. For more info, check www.gbwinsurance.com
“Uncontrolled Messaging From Three Directions
Today, many companies see social media as a valuable component of their marketing strategy. Some use it to spread the word about new products, keep in touch with existing customers and promote awareness of the company’s brand.
Social media sites, however, are also an uncontrolled environment where a company’s employees, customers and competitors can say just about anything they want. That may lead to liability, as these three examples illustrate: • An employee brags about his involvement with a new
celebrity customer, inadvertently releasing information that jeopardizes the business relationship and the celebrity’s publicity rights.
• A customer posts an angry outburst about a company’s product. Someone from the company responds, and the comments are later cited in the product liability suit filed by the customer.
• A competitor tweets about the poor warranty service provided by the company. An employee responds in a manner which defames the competitor with derogatory language about “lying” and “cheating.”
Companies Not Keeping Up
An effective strategy for managing risk from the online postings of customers and competitors focuses on monitoring and controlling the content of any response. When it comes to employees, however, companies have the opportunity to be more directive, establishing policies that restrict the use of social networking. Few companies have done so.
In the Travelers survey, about two-thirds of respondents said their companies do not have a policy regarding social media usage — or that they are not aware of one if it exists. This is a problem. The survey also indicated that one out of eight respondents post work-related information on social media websites, and 30 percent feel such postings are acceptable as long as they believe the information is true. In addition, 75 percent said they were “not at all” or “not very” concerned about online postings causing professional damage.”