What is Cyber Crime?

Alan Dainty, Cyber Risk Director at Thomas Miller Specialty, answers this common question.

If you talk to the finance or executive function of businesses today you will discover that ‎many, if not all, have experience of third parties trying to defraud them of money by criminal means. Typical examples include the presentation of false invoices or impersonation of innocent senior executives giving fraudulent written remittance instructions.

These acts of crime are committed by organised criminals who hit multiple victims with the same or similar attempted scams in the assumption that many will fail but some will succeed. Often they do.

This type of crime is often misinterpreted incorrectly as Cyber Crime, which it is not. There is no intrusion of an insured network or hack of any system to acquire information.‎ More often than not only some simple Web or telephone research is required into the names of staff in a mid-level finance function or executive team. ‎These are often referred to as social engineering frauds.

Thomas Miller Specialty has developed a new insurance product to respond to the specific threat of theft of own, first party, funds due to commercial crime activity. It has specific language to respond to social engineering threats referred to above. ‎

Specialist Cyber Risk policies also refer to Cyber or Computer Crime. Here, of course, ‎the typically covered theft or crime loss is that of the insured (i.e. first party loss) resulting from unauthorised access to their computer network. More clearly Cyber Crime as opposed to general, non-breach or hack, criminal type activity.

Thomas Miller Specialty's Cyber Risk product is classic Cyber Risk business interruption insurance with some bespoke extensions to include harm and extended triggers for network events. Data and privacy liability and crisis management expenses are also insured. E-Crime insurance includes coverage for theft of own first party funds from social engineering. Contact them or visit the website to learn more.