Some of the prominent cyberthreats that affect organizations the most rapidly right now are ransomware and zero day attacks. Firms and individuals must give this type of cybercrime high attention when securing their networks because it can attack businesses of any size in any industry. Like a fire, an earthquake, or any other disaster, ransomware may completely destroy a company with no prior notice. Fortunately, businesses who are the target of a ransomware attack can turn to insurance to recover some or all of their stolen financial losses, just like with the majority of other catastrophes.
If one can locate reasonable insurance, cyber insurance can significantly help lower company fears about ransomware attacks. In the expanding market for cyber insurance, insurers provide much more than just compensation to victims. They frequently provide proactive risk mitigation tools, as well as crucial services like breach response support, to help firms quickly resume operations following a ransomware attack.
What is Ransomware Insurance?
Because businesses are attempting to purchase protection against the devastating results of a successful ransomware attack, ransomware insurance has become a more popular product in recent years. Why try to purchase insurance? A single successful attack, such as NotPetya, which caused a total of $10 billion in damages, can practically bring down a huge corporation.
Attacks by ransomware are infamously challenging to completely defend against. Insurance companies intervened to provide a product, just like they would with any other potentially disastrous incident. (Tebele, 2022) Insurance companies offer to pay for many of the losses brought on by a ransomware attack in return for a premium.
A ransomware policy may provide coverage for lost revenue if the attack prevents business activities from continuing or for lost important data if ransomware causes data to be lost or deleted. (Tebele, 2022) In some cases, a policy will reimburse the criminal’s demand for the ransom if you are victimized by extortion.
Why should every Indian opt for ransomware insurance?
With the recent developments in world affairs and especially after the skirmish between India and China involving the Arunachal Pradesh, Ladakh region and the Doklam issue cyber-attacks on Indian individuals and companies have become very frequent.
Just a month after the remarks of Nupur Sharma on prophet Mohammed invited many attacks on Indian government websites, media outlets and people associated with the political party in power. On May 25 this year Indian budget carrier SpiceJet was affected by a ransomware attack which left the company’s IT system affected causing a delay in the audit process and the release of quarterly earnings.
Another attack was faced by Telangana and AP Power utilities in 2021. Every server was offline until the problem was fixed. Since the computer systems of the power utilities in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh were connected, the virus attack propagated quickly and brought down all the systems. One of the top 10 nations affected by the Petya ransomware was India. The largest seaport in India saw a ransomware attack that shut down one of its terminals, resulting in a computer lockdown and major effects on exports for the nation. Malware Attack on BSNL. Almost 2000 broadband modems were affected by a significant malware attack on the state-owned telecom provider BSNL After the Telecom Circle was targeted by the malware attack, 60,000 modems stopped working. Another instance of such attack was faced by aviation industry juggernaut INDIGO airways when a Bangalore based software engineer hacked their website to locate and retrieve his lost luggage.
In order for businesses to run smoothly and not pay ransoms which at times amount to a huge sum of money Indian businesses should invest in ransomware insurance as well as getting educated in ransomware awareness. Some other methods for protection can be:
- Training in Employee Awareness
Humans are the weakest link in any chain and are therefore readily duped by cyber threat actors who frequently use emails as bait in their attempts to attack a company. Therefore, firms must inform their staff about the current cyber dangers in order to prevent and solve this issue. The risk of employee error can be decreased with the aid of a suitable security attack simulator and awareness training tool. These technologies aid in reducing the organization’s current cyber threats and strengthen its cyber security posture.
- Separately backup your data.
Backing up your data on a different external storage device that isn’t connected to your computer is the best method to stay proactive. By creating a backup of your data, you can protect it from being encrypted and abused by hackers.
- Vulnerability Assessments Frequently
Malware like ransomware can be avoided by practicing basic cyber security hygiene like vulnerability evaluation and penetration testing. Continuous vulnerability assessment makes it possible to identify exploitable flaws and remedy them before a threat actor does.
- Never open links that aren’t verified.
Do not click on links that are included in spam emails or on websites you are unfamiliar with. When a user clicks on one of these links, harmful files are transmitted that seriously damage the machine of the user. Additionally, these linkages provide ransomware with access to the user’s machine through which it can lock or encrypt private data in exchange for a payment.
Author – Mr. Shrey Madaan, Research Associate, CyberPeace Foundation
