Page 14 - Insurance Times March 2019

International

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DBS Hong Kong offers in- How cyber insurance can protect against the emerging

surance against cyber ‘sextortion’ threat
A new cyber risk has been threatening companies in recent months, playing into
bullying the fears of business owners and employees and trying to

blackmail them out of money. International specialist insurer
Beazley has reported on an increase of this new threat,
dubbed ‘sextortion’. The company’s Breach Response Services
area has conducted a report showing an alarming increase in
people falling for the new scam that threatens business.
The sextortion cyber scam attempts to extort money from
people by sending an email claiming to have embarrassing evidence of them
accessing adult material on their computer. Sometimes the email will claim to
have webcam footage of the person recorded while viewing the adult mate-
DBS Hong Kong has launched an in- rial. To make the email seem even more real, sometimes it will include a pass-
surance product which offers cover- word of the person’s, usually sold to the cybercriminal from a data breach.
age against cyberbullying, online
The criminal will then request bitcoins or other cyber currency or else they will
privacy invasion, and identity theft. send the material they claim to have to the person’s workplace, family and
CyberOne is being touted as Hong friends. This latest attack, for example, has been created simply because crimi-
Kong’s first insurance scheme to of- nals had access to information that was breached, and needed ways to use that
fer financial support for trauma information. “This sextortion epidemic is happening because attackers had
counselling, legal consultation and access to literally billions of breached email addresses and account passwords,”
action, tech support, and other ur- Sanchez explained. “The Facebook breach, many others have put into their
gent needs due to online activities. hands literally millions of identities and they have to find a way to exploit that,
The insurance programme is under- ways to make money from this.”
written by Chubb Insurance, offers a This is why cyber insurance is important for businesses, Sanchez believes. He
24-hour hotline and a team of outlines that many employees are more careless with cybersecurity when access-
trauma counselling specialists, legal ing emails at work, assuming that their employer would have filtered out junk or
experts and tech support. scam emails. So, if there is an extortion or malware issues, like can happen with
this sextortion email where a clicked link can install a program to steal informa-
CyberOne is part of DBS Hong Kong’s
new microinsurance offering, which tion, it’s important for the business to have insurance that will cover them.
also includes PassengerOne for “This is not a fixed risk - cyber threats are changing because as we adapt to
medical coverage and compensa- defend against a particular type of incident the attackers will just move on to
tion, Travel One for worry-free trav- the next type of thing they can think of. And they’re actually quite creative.”
This particular scam has been so successful that police have had to issue warn-
els, and PurchaseOne for safe shop-
ings about the ‘sextortion’ threat from cyber criminals, meaning businesses
ping.
should take real note.(insurancebusinessmag.com)
14 The Insurance Times, March 2019