Following last week’s downtime from O2 of 24 hours, which to most of us felt like a lifetime, it has given us a prompt to remind our clients of how important Cyber Insurance can be, in particular for mobile phones.
It is scary to think how much we rely on our smart phones for lots of different things. Where originally mobile phones were for the use of making and receiving calls, how many of us rely on this for other everyday tasks? Calendars/diaries, social media, banking, maps, credit reports, shopping, even rail tickets?
As we know, O2 are suggesting compensation for the downtime and it has even been mentioned that we can claim for additional expenses through the loss of apps. An example of this is being unable to use the railcard app, meaning tickets were purchased at an inflated rate. Not an obvious one, but nonetheless, something that can cost your business additional money. A cyber policy wouldn’t have covered last weeks’ events, as the loss of service was due to a technical fault rather than a cyber attack. Therefore the cost of compensation will be entirely down to O2 to pay.
The downtime a lot of us experienced has highlighted to us the question of how we cope as a business if we can’t access our phones.
When looking at the risks of a cyber attack in your business, generally speaking our biggest vulnerability is our people. Not intentionally, but in simple things that most of us do daily that we probably don’t even think about. Using free Wi-Fi that doesn’t have proper encryption is a huge trigger, suspect attachments on emails etc.
Many people don’t consider their smart phones, or other mobile devices, as computers and therefore don’t tend to worry much about protecting them. The reality is that smart phones can be compromised relatively easily, especially since we now use them for so much more than just calls. Our phones contain so much personal sensitive data and company/client data that most of our information is ready for criminals to steal.
If our smart phones or other mobile devices are compromised by a cyber attack, a cyber policy would be there to assist with the many problems that you could face, including rebuilding of servers, fines for breach of loss of data, costs to recover the data and costs associated with loss of earnings. Cyber attacks are the new burglary and can happen to us irrespective of the size of our company. So in the aftermath of the O2 network issues, let’s think about the impact a cyber attack can have on the use of our company phones.
To discuss cyber cover in more details please do not hesitate to contact us.
By Leah Kendall – Account Executive