by Angela Guess
A recent press release reports, “Breaches of data security are an increasingly serious problem for data-intensive industries of all kinds. Recent research shows that 90% of all large organizations—including insurance carriers—suffered cyber security breaches in 2015, up from 81% in 2014.1 Moreover, cybersecurity breaches are becoming more frequent and more expensive; according to the Ponemon Institute’s latest study on cybersecurity, the average consolidated total cost of a data breach grew from $3.8 million to $4 million. The study also reports that the average cost incurred for each lost or stolen record containing sensitive and confidential information increased from $154 to $158.2.”
The release continues, “‘This is something to which insurers need to pay careful attention,’ said Michael Macauley, CEO of Quadrant Information Services, a leading supplier of pricing analytics services to property and casualty insurance carriers. ‘As an industry, insurers tend to believe that their data—and with it, the trust of their policyholders—is secure. At one time, that might have been a reasonable assumption; but insurance, which is now a high-tech industry, is just as vulnerable to attacks by hackers as are banking, retail, entertainment, and the other categories of enterprise that have been hit with this problem’.”
It adds, “Macauley noted that in bolstering their cybersecurity programs, insurers should be vigilant in protecting not only against external vulnerabilities, but internal ones, as well. ‘One factor is simple employee negligence, a lot of which can be ameliorated by training. For instance, if an employee gets a phishing email—and everybody does from time to time—they need to know that they should never, under any circumstances, click on the link. If they’re in an open office and in the course of their work they access data of different types with different passwords, they need to know that they should never keep a Post-it note on their desk with the passwords on it’.”
Read more at PRWeb.
Photo credit: QIS