Are You Covered in the Event of a Cyber Attack?

By Cass Jacoby.  

One of the biggest risks your company currently faces is cyber liability, are you insured in the event of an attack? 

In Season 4, Episode 38 of the Roofing Road Trips Podcast Heidi J. Ellsworth discusses cybersecurity with cyber insurance expert Andy Metzler of Acrisure and Cheryl Ambrose of The National Roofing Contractors Association (NRCA).  

Cyber security is most likely a nagging thought at the back of your mind — it is one of those things that you think about every now and then and make a mental note to look into it but never seem to get to. With all of the work that goes into running a roofing company and putting on roofs, the last thing on most contractors’ minds is cyber liability.  

“It’s a risk that lives in the shadows,” says Cheryl. “But it's really surfacing to become more and more of a risk as we have more people working remotely. Everything's becoming so digitized. Digital, electronic communications, everything." 

The more that we rely on technology within our businesses, the more, unfortunately, we expose ourselves to potential cyber-attacks. These new risks come with new technological territory the roofing industry is exploring, and is often forgotten in the glamour of these tools that help us automate and do our jobs more efficiently. 

“It's something that is such a new risk, it is not a traditional risk that we've talked about for the last 100 years in the roofing industry,” agrees Andy. “A lot of us have data in our systems. If you think about it, there's lots of invoices, and transactions, and data that companies are now storing that they didn't traditionally store...Every time you have a system, or something that integrates with a system, you have an exposure there, and, obviously, that's just something that's becoming more and more prevalent. That's a privacy risk that if somebody gets a hold of that data, the owner of the company is going to be liable for that.” 

To help members address cyber liability risks, NRCA has partnered with Acrisure to launch NRCA’s Cyber Liability Insurance Program. The program offers insurance policies that cover business interruption exposures (any business reliant on technology for its day-to-day operations has this exposure), as well as the privacy risks posed by storing sensitive data and costs associated with cyber incident response. 

“What we really need to understand about a cyber policy is it covers two major things, it covers the data and the systems,” says Andy. “It's either your financial assets or your actual systems which cause a business interruption... Whether it's compromising your data or just shutting you out of your systems, you can't communicate with your clients. There's a very real liability there.” 

Listen to the podcast to learn more about cyber security and what you can do to protect your company from cyber-attacks.  

Learn more about NRCA in their directory or visit www.nrca.net. 

About Cass  

Cass works as a reporter/writer for RoofersCoffeeShop, AskARoofer and MetalCoffeeShop. When she isn’t writing about roofs, she is putting her Master degree to work writing about movies and dancing with her plants.