Lawley’s cybersecurity and specialty insurance direct Reggie Dejean was recently featured on a expose by WIVB’s Luke Moretti about “Big and small companies on the radar of data hackers.”


“You just don’t know what’s at stake,” said Dejean.

Dejean talked about how data breaches can be especially tough on the bottom-line of small businesses.

He says the cost of dealing with a breach can quickly add up, even before a lawsuit is settled.

“You can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars for the credit monitoring, the notification costs, the public relations. All those costs that a small business can incur that may put them out of business,” Dejean said.

There’s even insurance for this sort of thing — privacy liability, designed to protect a company in the event of a data breach.

Generally speaking, Dejean says for about $1,000 a year, small businesses and nonprofits can get up to a million dollars of coverage.

“You think about a small business. A million, two million, three million of revenue or less. When you start looking at the credit monitoring, the legal costs, the forensic, you can easily be in the $200,000 range,” Dejean said. “How many businesses doing a million dollars revenue a year. How many businesses can afford, bottom-line $200,000? They can’t.”

Moretti explained that businesses and organizations should be asking these questions, according to the experts:

• What information are you handling?
• Where is it located?
• Who has access to it?
• What protections are in place?
• What kind of training do employees receive?
• What’s your plan if a breach happens?

The story can be viewed here in its entirety.

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