On 28th February 2019, last Thursday, and the company’s 365th day, we were the victims of a cyber attack. Between 10.19am and 12.37pm we received over 300 emails, emanating from our website’s Contact Us page. The content of the emails was just a series of random characters, as was the subject field – there were no suspicious links or instructions to do anything, but the volume was huge (more than one a minute) and was a major annoyance, as inboxes became clogged. Fortunately, we were able to contact our IT support company who took the relevant page down, amended the security, and had it back up within a few hours.
As far as we can tell we were the victim of an attempted denial of service attack of sorts – it was designed to be a nuisance, and if it had continued unchecked, or had escalated, it certainly would have been. Thankfully we are not reliant on our website either to transact business or to place cover for our clients, and as such taking the relevant page down didn’t present us with any issues, apart from a few lost minutes making phone calls to the IT company, and quite a few more deleting piles of emails.
But worryingly this does suggest that cyber attacks, and more pointedly those undertaking them, are not targeting specific organisations where they think they can cause major disruption to the business, which would lead to a ransom possibly being paid. They are indiscriminate, using a scatter-gun approach – and this is more worrying for those of us who can’t think of any reason why we might be targeted. The reason is simply that we are connected to the internet, and it takes very little effort on the part of the hackers to add more targets to their campaigns.
Our view – we should all take cyber risk more seriously, as we are all potential targets. Insurance to cover lost revenue is available, but we believe that the insurance products that offer immediate assistance in dealing with an attack are far more valuable than those that will simply write a cheque a few months after an attack has brought a business to its knees.