Protecting Your Business from Cyber Villains

An employee received an email to say that she had been caught speeding and clicked the button which offered to show a photograph of her being caught in the act. Shortly afterwards our client received an email from someone in Russia to say that they had infected their systems with the Cryptolocker virus and that all files on its servers were encrypted. The encrypted files included customer records and software used to run the business. The Russians were asking for $5,000 in Bitcoins for the decryption key. Insurers approved the client’s payment of the ransom. Unfortunately this only recovered 90% of the files and they needed an IT contractor to help them recover the remainder. Their insurance policy covered this business interruption as well as the costs of being unable to trade for a couple of days and not being fully up-to-speed for a couple of weeks. Total payment $35,000.

A company using Office 365 Business email discovered that an email forwarding rule had been turned on by a hacker who had gained access to the network. The result was that all emails received by the inbox were also forwarded to the hackers inbox. The company was alerted to the breach by a client who received a fake email from the company asking to pay money into the hackers bank account. Damage to the companies reputation meant that they lost the client. Insurers paid for the loss of income caused by the reputational damage as well as reimbursed the investigation costs and increased costs of working, totalling $120,000.

The Insured received an invoice, purportedly from a known supplier, requesting payment for
an outstanding debt. The Insured transferred $27,000 in accordance with the email instructions. The next week the Insured discovered that the email was fraudulent and payment had been made to a hacker.