General Insurance Article - JLT comment on Talk-Talk cyber-attack

 "This attack on TalkTalk, coming just months after the data breach at Carphone Warehouse, highlights the pervasive nature of cyber attacks on UK companies, as well as the real life steps that those companies are forced to take in a data breach situation. The fact that not all of the TalkTalk data is encrypted is a sign that they, like all companies, are likely to have had to make trade-offs in security spending and probably had compensating controls in place that were unfortunately circumvented. They are in the process of notifying the potentially 4 million individuals affected and are offering a year of credit monitoring services to those individuals, which will carry a significant cost. Traditional insurance products aren't likely to respond to the potentially significant incident response costs, but if TalkTalk took up cyber insurance then they will be receiving incident response support from their insurer as well as defraying the costs. It's important for companies to remember that security and insurance spending are not mutually exclusive, but that spending on and implementing security is never a complete solution that removes all risk.”