When it comes to cyber security things like ransomware or hacking might not be the most common or dangerous threat anymore.
The new most common type of hack is what’s called data exfiltration. This is something that your company should be very worried about because it’s worse than a ransomware attack. When a ransomware attack happens, the hacker gets into your system and locks down your system, scrambles or encrypts your data, and says, if you pay us a ransom, we will unencrypt and unlock your data. And that’s a little bit easier of a problem to solve because you could pay to unlock it or sometimes you can just disconnect your computers from the internet and hire some expert to unlock it locally. Well, exfiltration is different.
What is data exfiltration?
Exfiltration is when they download all your data. They exfiltrate it from your server and then they delete it. They wipe your server so now they have all your information. You can’t restore it on your own. And sometimes they don’t even ask you for a ransom. They just sell it to somebody else like a competitor to the black market or the dark web. The compensation from the competitor alone might be more valuable than any ransom you could pay. Even if you pay a ransom, now they have their own copy of it so they can do whatever they want with it anyway.
So data exfiltration is much more dangerous than a hack or a ransomware attack. Is this something you want to be protected for? Well, you can purchase certain types of cyber liability insurance. Some of it covers these types of attacks, some do not. Make sure that when you’re looking at your policy that you’re going to purchase for cyber liability insurance if you do want to be covered for data exfiltration, you specifically make sure that’s part of your coverage because cyber liability policies are not standard policies. In most cases, they’re what’s called excess and surplus lines. Every policy is going to be different and it might be different for different companies based on your threat profile.
So be aware of data exfiltration as a cyber attack vector on your server and make sure that you have good cyber defense built in so that you have a trip wire that will go off if large amounts of data are being downloaded from your system and it’ll notify somebody or just shut down the connection to make sure you’re not a victim of this new type of hack against corporate clients.
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