How you can fall victim to cyber crime

Cyber crime is an activity that can affect a wide range of individuals and organisations.

The rise of hacking and malware remains ever growing with a number of high profile cases of data breaches.

It is not always data these thieves are after, some want to encrypt your data and force you to pay in order to get it back.

However, it is not just huge corporations being made victims of cyber crime as almost everyone is vulnerable to hackers with them constantly changing the ways they target unsuspecting people.

Courtesy of insurance provider Hiscox, here are a few examples of how some have fallen foul of cyber crime –

Malware
“Our client was contacted by a government agency and advised that government security services had detected an intrusion on its systems. Our IT forensic experts were deployed to investigate and assess the extent to which the network had been compromised. A significant amount of malware was discovered on our client’s servers so a containment plan was executed to remove all malware. Our client was also able to take legal and PR advice under their insurance cover to help them decide how and when to communicate this incident to their clients.”

Ransom
“An employee from a chain of opticians – 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 patient records and software used to run the business. The Russians were asking for £400 in Bitcoins for the decryption key. We 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.”

Stolen
“Contacted by a ‘white hat hacker’ (ethical computer hacker or a computer security expert), our client was told that usernames and passwords for two of their websites had been stolen. We called in IT forensic experts to investigate, who confirmed there had been a hack and set about plugging the security breach. Legal advice was also taken to confirm whether or not our client was required to notify the individuals whose usernames had been compromised.”

For further information on our Cyber Liability and Financial Crime insurance, please contact us on 01274 515 747 or email us at mail@lwood.co.uk

Source: Hiscox