The Insurance Experts for E-Businesses

TechInsurance provides General & Professional Liability/E&O, Workers’ Comp and Umbrella Liability insurance coverage for Internet-based businesses.

E-Business Insurance

E-business insurance protects your business from loss of revenue; loss of reputation; public disclosure of private information; libel, slander, disparagement and/or e-business extortion; and liability for copyright infringement and/or theft of data, income, securities, software, or computer resources.

Regulators are developing best-practice guidelines that will eventually become the e-business insurance industry's standards. In the meantime, coverage varies from one provider to another. The International Organization for Standardization has committed to a certification program for allocation of security resources and responsibilities, asset clarification, awareness and access controls, employee training, government compliance, network and systems security, physical security, and policy.

ISO 17799 has emerged as one security standard for information technology, although it has not been widely embraced due to its inflexibility and simplistic “key control” approach.

The Center for Internet Security is a non-profit enterprise that helps reduce risks of business and e-commerce disruptions that may result from inadequate security controls. CIS is responsible for consensus best-practice standards for security configuration, accepted by U.S. government agencies for Federal Information Security Management Act, or FISMA, compliance and by auditors for International Organization of Standardization, or ISO, standard compliance.

In assessing e-business risk and setting premiums, insurance companies look at clients' electronic publishing liability, property damage, business interruption, damage to reputation, restoration costs, intellectual property loss, business income loss, and extortion. The firming insurance markets mean that both e-business insurance rates and premiums are headed upward, but most industry observers agree that rates had been driven too low and that the increases are necessary.

Faced with such new products, industry leaders note that until they have claims, they can’t develop metrics for frequency, cost and probability. University-based research groups are introducing factors by which premiums will be adjusted. For example, Carnegie Mellon University CERT Coordination Center noted that 15,167 incidents were reported in 2000, up from 9,859 the previous year.