Did you know that more than 300 billion emails are sent and received each day around the globe? Your business may receive more than its fair share of them, and your employees may have individual email boxes that always appear to be full. With so much coming in daily and seeing as your employees are busy anyway, certain dangers lurk within those email boxes. What will happen if one of your employees inadvertently opens a "bad" email, and how can you protect your business against such an eventuality?

Held to Ransom

You may have heard horror stories in the past about employees opening an email attachment that may have been infected with a ransomware virus. Certainly, you can educate your employees so that they are less likely to do this, but should the worst happen, you may find that access to your data and business systems are suddenly blocked. In this case, the software may have complete control of your business operations, and the perpetrator may try to extort you before they release their hold.

Unfortunately, those business owners that do pay may only face further extortion attempts and may need to call in specialist experts to try and help. To put it mildly, this can be an inconvenience, and it also comes with additional threats to your reputation and bottom-line revenues.

How Insurance Can Help

Thankfully, business insurance companies have now introduced cyber insurance policies. These can be tailored to meet the business's individual needs and will cover extortion threats and other issues. For example, a policy like this could pay to help you replace electronic data or provide you with defence costs if you were charged with a regulatory breach.

Other Potential Costs

Depending on the size of your business, you may have to go into "crisis management" mode and this, of course, comes with its own expenditure. Again, certain policies cover this and can also reduce the losses you may incur through an interruption to your normal business operations.

Acting Now

Unfortunately, these types of threats are only likely to increase in number, severity and impact. You should educate your employees to understand the risks and upgrade your software systems to include trigger warnings and other defensive devices. To make sure that you do not fall victim or, if you do, can recover as soon as possible, talk with your business insurance broker for their advice. They'll help you to get cyber insurance coverage and be as prepared as possible in an uncertain world.