The cyber insurance market has completely shifted over the last year. An increase in the number of claims and larger monetary damages associated with those claims has caused insurance carriers to adopt stricter underwriting guidelines, decrease coverage limits, and increase rates.

Over the years IT providers to small and medium businesses have built their relationships with clients on several different business models to provide various services. The foundation of the relationship has been help-desk, managing and maintaining technologies, and performing projects.

Although businesses today are becoming more aware and familiar with the increasing need to protect their IT (Information Technology) systems and data there remains a common misconception among small and medium businesses that they are not a target because they either are too small to notice, or they do not possess any non-public personal information that a bad actor would want to steal and sell on the dark web.

Cyber incidents continue to rise in 2021 with small and medium businesses dealing with ransomware, business email compromise and account takeovers. While large companies and ransomware dominates the nightly news and newspaper headlines the same activities are plaguing small businesses as well.

Colonial Pipeline, Scripps Health, Ireland’s National Healthcare and JBS Meat Packing have all made the headlines in recent weeks as victims of ransomware including the payments of close to $16M.

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