Taking Your Business Mobile: Protecting Your Assets In The Age Of Rampant Hacks

Any competitive business knows that going mobile is the best way to provide convenience and timeliness to their customers and clients. This may entail allowing consumers to enter sensitive information and make transactions via your mobile site. Besides establishing a secure connection to begin with, how can you safeguard confidential data in the face of a changing online landscape?

Installing a security camera and calling it a day is no longer enough to protect your business from intruders. Cyber security breaches can happen from anywhere in the world in the blink of an eye. It’s worthwhile to have a plan in place well before you find you have been the victim of an online security breach.

Besides identifying a safe and effective level of cyber-insurance insurance coverage with the help of a business insurance calculator, what measures should you have in place to respond to an unfortunate data breach on behalf of your company?

True Cost of Cyber Attacks

You might think that it won’t happen to you, but that’s a big gamble to make if you handle sensitive information about people’s identities. Not only do companies stand to lose money from an interrupted workflow, but can also face legal fees if any affected parties decide to sue.

And what about the damage to your reputation? Inga Beale, the CEO of Lloyd’s of London, points out that this is often the hardest thing to quantify. You can’t necessarily put a price tag on it, but there’s a lot at stake when it comes to losing the trust of clients and customers after a breach.

Perform Damage Control

Let’s say that you arrive at work in the morning only to find that your company has undergone an online security infringement. It’s not time to panic; it’s time to spring into action.

- Notify Affected Parties. Send a straightforward written communication to anyone affected that lays out what information was compromised. Explain what your company plans to do to remedy the situation. Go one step further and offer potential immediate solutions, like how customers can get in touch with a reputable credit monitoring service.

- Craft and Deploy a Response Plan. You’ll want to work on this well ahead of an actual breach. Fortune suggests formulating a written plan including contact information for attorneys, IT experts, and vendors who can handle the customer outreach portion. It’s also useful to keep an updated log of everyone who has access to your operations to identify possible weak spots.

- Analyze and Fix the Problem. Take stock of how exactly this hack occurred. For this, you may need to call in the forensic IT experts contained in your response plan. Entrepreneur outlines how you should take whatever steps necessary to eliminate the threat, whether that’s discarding infected hardware, applying a patch, or resetting passwords.

Reduce the Risks

What damages could be covered under a business insurance policy that includes cyber-security protection? Bloomberg lays out a few:

- Liability coverage against lawsuits
- Cost of notifying affected individuals
- Cost of providing credit monitoring
- Fines or penalties your company may face

It’s not good for business or for morale to find out that you’ve been targeted as part of a calculated cyber hack. Learn more about how your company can better protect itself and recover from cyber-attacks by crunching the numbers with CoverHound.