Today’s Fall Through the Cracks Friday looks at the potential cyber exposures to everyday items, from pacemakers and automobiles to emergency responders’ radios. With the 2012 Medical PL Symposium, with an added cyber focus, coming up in just 3 weeks this video really struck a chord with us at PLUS blog.
From our friends at TED…
Have a fantastic weekend friends. Watch for great content next week on kidnap & ransom insurance and disastrous PLI claims – fun stuff!
From the Wall Street Journal comes an article detailing the sophisitication of hackers, and how large firms are not the only targets being stalked. From the article:
With limited budgets and few or no technical experts on staff, small businesses generally have weak security. Cyber criminals have taken notice. In 2010, the U.S. Secret Service and Verizon Communications Inc.’s forensic analysis unit, which investigates attacks, responded to a combined 761 data breaches, up from 141 in 2009. Of those, 482, or 63%, were at companies with 100 employees or fewer. Visa Inc. estimates about 95% of the credit-card data breaches it discovers are on its smallest business customers.
In the time it takes to break into a major company like Citigroup Inc., a hacker could steal data from dozens of small businesses and not get detected, says Bryce Case Jr., a former hacker who broke into several government and corporate websites a decade ago and now runs an online message board for hackers called Digital Gangster. Now that small companies use computers, “the juice has become worth the squeeze,” he says. “Even a pizza place has addresses, names and credit-card information.”
You can read the full article here on the Wall Street Journal website.
From the Wall Street Journal Blogs:
Legal malpractice claims are up as much as 20 percent this year compared to last at some of the country’s leading insurance providers, a new survey finds.
Lingering effects of the economic recession and the continued real estate slump are fueling the rise in professional liability and malpractice claims brought against law firms, The Am Law Daily and Insurance Journal report.
The survey, managed by insurance broker Ames & Gough, polled six major insurance companies that collectively provide coverage to about three-quarters of midsized and large American law firms. The majority of surveyed firms cited increases anywhere from 6 to 20 percent, although two said claim levels were so far stable this year.
