Small Firm Exchange

Hi Saxon,

As a sole practitioner, your risk is 100% up to you. You mention two rotating hard drives, which are offline a lot of the time so are at lower risk. You're also using a Mac, which also reduces your risk, but doesn't eliminate it. How you store those two external hard drives could ramp up the risk a lot if they are always in the same location. That's not really a cybersecurity risk though.

The question is, how much is that data worth to you? If you can't reproduce it and all of your backups are corrupted/encrypted, then what would be your plan? 

Personally, if I was a sole-practitioner and had a good backup strategy (one of them being cloud-based), then I wouldn't think that cybersecurity insurance would be necessary. However, I'm a little more risk accepting because I'm quite confident with technology and am fairly well versed with cybersecurity.

Greg Francis
Director of Operations

ALSC Architects

Hello Saxon (and others) -

Eight or ten years ago I opened an attachment that I shouldn't have.  The "Lockey" virus came out, and locked up a lot of my files.  Not every file, and only the ones that were in my system at the time.  But, as you can imagine, a major pain. 

I will guess that the cyber criminals do a better job now days and their routines will continue to attack.  [ I was a bit lucky in that, while Lockey could get to any drives, even backup drives, it didn't go after emails; so, I was able to go to emails, download attachments from them, and regain basic format for reports, etc. that I was creating.  Lockey was also selective about file types - and .dwg-format files I had, as downloads from others, were locked up, but none of my ARRIS cad files were ... ] "Word", "Excell", jpg, etc were locked. 

My General Liability insurance carrier (Travelers) wouldn't pay the ransom.  They did pay for an unsuccessful restoration attempt by a local computer service company.  The insurance rep also, after thinking for a while, gave me a name for a person "who might be able to help".  Said person tried a few files and was successful.  So, I paid for the rest of them to get unlocked, and then watched the directory display on my screen have each and every file's suffix change from "lky" (or whatever it was) to its original one.  { I have no idea how he had the "key" to do the unlocking } Insurer paid for the restoration, less the deductible.  I also got reimbursed for the time I had spent looking for fixes, which I thought was pretty reasonable.

I suspect that the cyber crooks have better virus / ransomware now.  I also suspect that the insurers have written the policy endorsements more narrowly, thus your agent's "you can pay for this coverage" call. 

I don't open files from people I don't know.  I don't open any of the "here is a fax sent to you" files.  I have a reasonably good cyber security program running.  I do still have a backup harddrive connected all of the time (hmm, might be good to have two, and switch between them, unplugging one for safe keeping).  No idea if paying to do backups to the cloud gets enough insulation between a potential attacker and your files.

If your general liability coverage is an "engineers" policy (Travelers' name for what I carry), it might include "document restoration" as a covered loss.  I think that goes back to the old days where physical drawings would be redrawn if they were damaged by fire or whatever; not sure if it includes cyber material.

I think anyone is a potential target.  And, along with losing access to your files, perhaps the crooks' programs also use your email to spread ransom attempts to everyone in your address book, and then a downstream victim comes after you for spreading the attack to their system.  It's a crazy world that we live in.

Does your current policy not have anything currently? 

Of your exposure risk is small then you've probably answered your question. Make sure you have a good virus software although I think Macs have pretty good antivirus software. And do more local backups on a hard drive. That's probably better money well spent.