New online publishing and social media venues. New applications and business systems. New, and almost always mobile, devices. And with the cloud, new locations for your data and applications, from around the corner to around the world. Technological change maintains its relentless pace—and each new development brings new risk factors that businesses ignore at their peril.

It's no longer a question of “if,” but rather, “when,” a cyber-related threat confronts your business or your clients' businesses, warned Laura Toops, editor of American Agent & Broker, as she kicked off a recent PropertyCasualty360 web seminar titled “Cyber Liability: A View from the Trenches.” Citing Ponemon Institute data, Toops noted that 71% of businesses surveyed faced cyber-attacks in 2011. Yet the majority of companies remain unprepared for cyber-attacks that can threaten their data, their customers' data, their employees, and the operations and reputation of their businesses, Toops said. Only 38 percent say they are increasing their 2012 budgets to address these cyber threats.

Everyone's on the Hot Seat
All too often, cyber liability still is viewed as a problem to be addressed by the IT department. That's a critical mistake, Toops said, because a cyber-attack puts “a lot of people on the hot seat”—among them agents and brokers, risk managers, senior management, outside auditors, and even a company's board of directors. She cited the recent example of Wynham; in June, the Federal Trade Commission sued the hotelier for alleged data security failures that resulted in three security breaches during the past two years.