Cyber security is a persistent and undeniable concern. After events such as the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack in April, it’s shown to be an expensive one as well.
Columbia County’s Technology Services Department wants to put such concerns to rest.
At the Proposed Management and Internal Services Committee meeting on July 13, Michael Blanchard, technology services director, requested over $45,000 for a specialty risk protector cyber-attack insurance policy by AIG. The policy would insure support and services to recover loss in the event of a data breach.
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“Imagine your car insurance, except imagine that people are trying to hit you,” he said.
Blanchard and his team already take great measures to secure Columbia County records and data in its network from data breaches; however, a hacker would only need to be lucky once.
“That’s why we need cyber security insurance,” he said. “We live in a world where there are people who want to steal data; they want to compromise networks; they want to do bad things.”
AIG is also not the only company that offers such insurance. Several companies, such as Berkshire Hathaway, CNA Financial and The Hartford Financial have entered the cyber security insurance market.
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Such policies offer a wide variety of coverages. These include data recovery, public relations costs, investigation costs and ransom payments among many others.
While there are such policies available to small businesses, policyholders tend to be larger private companies and city governments.
“There’ll be a company that will have to be big because the stakes with cyber security insurance are usually very high,” said Blanchard. “Whenever you read about in the media that there’s been a breach, there’s never a breach where somebody has stolen 10 passwords from somebody. It’s always XYZ suffered a breach and they lost customer data for 40 million accounts or 500,000 of their users. Larger insurance corporations are equipped to handle these types of breaches.”
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He notes that securing such a policy is part of an overall measure to provide protection for the data of Columbia County and the data of its residents.
“It’s in our best interest to make sure we’re as protected as we can be,” he said.
The committee approved to put the matter on the agenda for the next County Commission meeting. The board will meet July 20.
Skyler Q. Andrews is a staff reporter with The Augusta Press. Reach him at skyler@theaugustapress.com.
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