Impact Of WFH On Cyber Insurance Market

Home Wi-Fi & Public Network To Access Internet

When you work from the office and access the internet through your office’s secure network, the chances of malware attacks decrease. It is because the IT department of the company can monitor the activities of a user and any cyber attack attempt on their cloud system. Well, this became a serious issue when employees were sent to work from home and started using home wi-fi and public network to access the internet.

As everything depends on the internet now, cyberbullies see it as an opportunity to break into the network and access employees' computers to access the official data. Once they get access to official data they encrypt it and make it inaccessible for everyone.

Vulnerable Video Conference

Since employees were working from home and delivering their work through emails, to keep a track of completing the targets that were time-bound and weekly team meetings. In the beginning when online conferences became regular and video conferencing software like hangout and skype could not manage the load of so many users at once, new software started emerging in the market with better features and an increased number of participants in one meeting. However, the cybersecurity maintained by these new online video conferencing software was not up to the mark.

These online conferences opened vulnerabilities and became risky for the company's data and information. The vulnerability became an opportunity and gave them the chance to access these meetings unanimously. They could leak the content of the conference calls to others for money. No matter how the claim of end-to-end encryption made by these software companies when they weren’t, the hackers could use phishing links to send emails to the target and execute ransomware attacks.

That’s where the multi-factor authentication came in with a trust of security. Even then numerous ways of bypassing security measures led to ransomware attacks.

So, how does remote working would impact the cyber insurance policy?

WFH & Cyber Insurance

Companies with confidential data and information are the prime target for hackers. The companies that have data stored on cloud are prone to cyberattacks and this is why they secure themselves with cyber insurance policy. No matter how secure a company’s network is or how strong a companies firewall is, hackers, find their way to hack into their data. This is where a cyber insurance policy comes in handy.

The impact of WFH on cyber insurance will depend on the policy wordings. With the rapid conversion from work from office to work from home, the insurance companies will see an increment in demand for cyber insurance. So, the insurance companies will also have to make sure that they provide coverage keeping the work-from-home trend in mind otherwise they might have to face unnecessary trouble.

Let’s take an example of Mobikwik here, as per Business Standard reports, the personal data of 3.5 million users such as their phone number, addresses, PAN number, Aadhaar card, etc. were exposed. The company has not accepted that their data was breached and it was until RBI intervened and ask Mobikwik to conduct the forensic audit immediately by CERT-IN auditors and submit the report that mentions the company works with essential authority.