Oak Underwriting has enhanced its household product by adding more cyber cover as standard.
In addition to its existing cover for Cyber Assistance, policy holders will now benefit from Cyber Crime and Cyber Legal Defence protection as part of their insurance.
This latest addition to the product is designed to protect households from the growing range of cyber risks. The policy now covers losses from fraud, telephone hacking and ransom resulting from a cyber attack.
In addition, Oak’s product will pay costs and expenses to defend legal rights arising from a claim as a result of a data privacy breach, virus transmission, defamation and disparagement or a compensation award.
There are three levels of cyber cover within the policy:
- Cyber assistance: the cost of investigating, reconfiguring and rectifying any damage to the client’s home systems and restoring the data. (A home system can be any personal computing or electronic device that connects to the internet, or to other electronic devices, associated data, software and programs). This also covers the cost of locating a virus and removing it from the home system and hiring a professional consultant to make recommendations on how to prevent home systems from being hacked or infected.
- Cyber crime: will pay the financial loss if the fraudulent input, destruction or modification of data in the home systems results in the loss of money, goods, services, property and/or other financial benefits. It also covers the cost of responding to a cyber ransom or cyber demand where a third party has disrupted the home systems with a computer virus or threatens to use your personal electronic data in a way which might harm your reputation.
- Cyber legal defence: will cover the legal defence if a client is accused of failing to secure, or prevent unauthorised access to private data.
Oak has developed the product with DAS UK Group, who have commissioned research into the cyber insurance market which has demonstrated the importance of cyber protection. The market is developing rapidly, with 58% of brokers surveyed expecting the market to grow in the next two years.
Brokers are also aware of the great importance of cyber insurance with 56% rating the online threat as either the most important, or among the most important insurance risks faced by consumers.
Mark Peters, head of Oak Underwriting, said: “Cyber security is becoming increasingly important to us all in the digital age. Yet, whilst the need for cyber protection is growing, many people don’t realise they need it until it’s too late.”