Understanding Your Cyber Risk – A View From Canada

At Blaney McMurtry, our clients and their policyholders regularly face the uncertainty of evolving cyber risk. While an element of chance is present in most business endeavors, cyber and electronic risks pose particular challenges as they are singularly difficult to predict and quantify. Breach by hackers was widely regarded the most significant electronic risk in Canada few years ago, before recently being supplanted in degree of concern by ransomware and denial of service attacks.

It is no longer simply the breach or attack itself which is of concern, but also the knock-on effects. Are businesses sufficiently protected against business interruption if their systems must be shut down for a few days (or more)? What if one of their key suppliers cannot operate due to a cyber event? Are they protected against such contingent business interruption? Are systems sufficiently secured and insured against physical results of cyber-attacks?