What Insurance Companies Should Look For in an IT Provider

Cyber Security Risks

How does cybersecurity affect insurance? Unfortunately, insurance companies are prime targets for scammers. With high volumes of personal data and information, a data breach can be catastrophic—regardless of whether the information is stolen or the network is penetrated, causing a loss of client records. Insurance companies’ information security needs to be highly protected and prioritized. Not only would the effects of a breach cause severe consequences for your company and its clients, but it could also diminish the credibility and reputation of your company. No one wants to give out their personal information if they think there’s a risk of it being stolen. Keep an eye out for common threats and what your company can do to combat them. 

Common Threats To Insurance Cybersecurity

• Ransomware: A type of malicious malware that locks the victim out of their own data by encrypting it and demands a ransom be paid for access to the data.
• Phishing: A deceptive email that appears to come from a legitimate source. Training employees to recognize suspicious emails can reduce risks drastically. 
• Malware: All it takes is the click of a button from a seemingly legitimate website, and your malware can fill with malware, destroying your systems. 
• Data breaches: Can cause detrimental impacts on your business, leaking private information and data or losing it altogether. 
• Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks (DDoS): Attackers overload a website or network with requests that cause the network to slow or become unresponsive, making it inaccessible to designated users. 

Ramp Up Your Protection 

IT support solutions for insurance companies should offer comprehensive cybersecurity solutions so you can have peace of mind with smart security testing services in place. Enterprise-level cybersecurity combats threats and implements layers of unrivaled protection for insurance company IT infrastructure. If you’ve been hacked or experienced cyber threats in the past, it’s time to reconsider your IT provider. Serving as many people’s financial and health security, insurance companies must be confident they can protect data from threats and focus on real-life insurer-related risks. 

Three-Layer Support 

Layer 1: Enterprise Antivirus Protection

The first layer of support delivers end-to-end protection and monitors numerous threat intelligence sources to validate indicators of network compromise. You’ll benefit from features like: 

• Automated Incident Reporting
• 24/7 Monitoring
• Real-time Scanning

Layer 2: Endpoint Detection Response (EDR)

AI algorithms offer an added layer of defense, working to monitor current applications even when no malicious activity is detected. The three-step approach includes: 

1. Forensics and analysis tools to research identified threats and search for suspicious activities.
2. The analysis of endpoint data to identify threat patterns.
3. Automatic response to identified threats to remove or contain them while notifying security personnel.     

Layer 3: Security Operations Center

Enterprise-grade security through insurance IT consulting means monitoring all endpoints for all possible threats. The key difference here is that threats can be escalated to humans with a depth of experience.

All endpoint data streams to a private cloud for analysis. After AI analyzes the data against known threats and vulnerabilities, it’s escalated to a real live human if needed. From there, the issues are remediated, and problem nodes are isolated.

Customized Ransomware Training

Your employees can be one of your biggest security threats. To ensure everyone is doing their part, your team should complete cybersecurity training in order to spot phishing emails and ransomware. If they don’t understand the risks and dangers of ransomware, you could be prone to attacks. With insurance companies, the entire team is strongly relying on technology for their tasks—so it’s imperative for everyone to be educated through ransomware training. 

Customized ransomware training includes:

• What ransomware is and how it works
• Ransomware prevention methods
• How to spot malicious links and phishing attempts
• Protecting your PC from other malware

Dual Two-Factor Authentication Endpoints

As you log onto your insurance software, strong managed IT support should implement two-factor authentication as an extra step of protection against threats. Two-factor authentication (2FA) on both user workstations and business servers adds a second level of security to every network under your company. 

2FA can take the form of the following, choosing whatever works best for you and your employees:

• Push notifications
• Text messages
• Biometric verifications (fingerprint, facial recognition, or retina patterns)
• An email to a secondary email address
• Software tokens

IT support for insurance companies can help you set up two-factor authentication to ensure you and your client’s information stays as protected as possible. You can never be too safe when it comes to protecting personal data.