For many businesses, the COVID-19 pandemic has drastically and negatively affected their security due to issues arising from permitting or directing many, if not all, of their employees to work remotely from home or elsewhere to avoid virus transmission.

In this work structure, technology has become more important than ever. Unfortunately, all too often remote activity is not a ‘cyber-safe’ working environment since remote-working individuals do not often enjoy the inherent protections afforded them at their place of business.

Some of the major factors contributing to critical cyber security threats in a remote work environment include:

• Bring Your Own Device (“BYOD”) policies for phones, tablets and laptops. Businesses can meet this issue effectively for employees by instituting Corporate Owned Personally Enabled (“COPE”) policies.
• Human error, prevalent before COVID-19, is greater now as a cyber security issue. Human error can be addressed in many ways including time-outs in key information systems and automated controls.
• Remote-working employees untrained in enhanced cyber security issues.
• Increased activity of cyber criminals targeting less secure remote systems and usage.

What can you do to help your business combat increased, COVID-enhanced cyber security risks? Begin with the importance of risk assessment as a necessary first step in dealing with cyber and COVID-19 exposures.

Your risk assessment must be thorough and comprehensive, price effective and have a rapid turnaround. This is particularly important now with the exposures changing rapidly in scope, kind and numbers.

To be useful to your business, any thorough assessment report must include recommended remediations and check lists. For flexibility, the process yielding a report should be algorithm-based. A full report should be ready for you in a matter of days, not weeks or months.

An effective process will assist underwriters in placing the right coverage and assist claims folks in determining if a claim is covered, all of which will likely save you a lot of time and expense.

An informed and well-crafted process will allow you to make informed decisions as to whether to fix, ignore or transfer given exposures.

If you have any questions regarding the foregoing, please contact Edward M. Dunham Jr. at (215) 241-8802 or edunham@sgrvlaw.com

By every measure, the incident rates of cyber-attacks and confidential information disclosure across all businesses are increasing exponentially. Spector Gadon & Rosen, P.C. emphasizes pre-breach services to assist our clients in preventing breaches in the first place. Because breaches are costly, intrusive and not going away, we developed the Cyber Exposure Analysis process (CEA) to combat cyber exposures head-on. CEA is straightforward, easy to use and generates a detailed cyber risk exposure profile report based on information furnished by our clients in CEA’s assessment survey.

CEA addresses the issues that keep CEOs, General Counsel and Risk Managers awake at night by targeting the major cyber-risk areas including:

• Breach of privacy claims, including non-consensual, misuse and misappropriation of personal data, identity theft and contravention of international privacy laws applicable to online businesses
• Contractual exposures inherent in the use of cloud computing
• Copyright, patent and trademark infringement claims
• The advantages and risks associated with the use of social media in an organization
• Non-Compliance with local, state, federal and foreign regulations pertaining to the safeguarding of privacy information
• Liability arising from systems failures and outages, viruses, worms and data corruption, hacking and other vulnerabilities in online offerings
• Trade secret protection, including questions of encryption, e-mail, extraordinary intercept measures, social media, discussion groups and Internet acquisition and distribution of trade secrets.

In the CEA process, we process the clients’ information feedback and issue a report that includes detailed responses to the clients’ answers, exposure evaluations keyed to the individual responses in the areas surveyed, graphical comparisons of the exposure areas surveyed, remediation check lists and an executive summary. Our proprietary algorithm-based technology makes possible the delivery of the report within five business days. Importantly, when the client retains us for the CEA process, what the client tells us in answering the questionnaire and what we recommend in the report is attorney-client privileged. The CEA report enables our clients to make informed cyber risk management decisions as to whether to fix the exposures, ignore them or transfer them by way of cyber risk insurance. We can assist our clients in carrying out whatever decisions they make.

For further guidance in this area, please contact Ned Dunham, Esquire, at 215-241-8802 or edunham@lawsgr.com.