How to Stay Protected From Cyber Extortion

Cyber Extortion is an online crime in which cyber criminals cause privacy breach and data infringement; and demand money from the victim and/or blackmail them to prevent the misuse and leakage of the stolen data. A very recent example of this type of cyber attack was the Wannacry ransomware attack, which affected around 200,000 systems all over the world.

With crucial data and huge sums of money at stake, it is pivotal that you purchase a cyber insurance policy to protect yourself in case of such an unfortunate incident.

There have been many cases where an individual was blackmailed and threatened by exploiting his/her private data. Cyber criminals have different approaches to extort money from you. Following are some instances of their approach based on the reported cases against cyber extortionists.

1. Approaching well-heeled people by posing as a fake person and indulging in emotional as well as financial blackmailing.
2. Using botnets to carry out cyber-attack from systems whose owners are unaware about any such attack being executed from their machines.
3. Monitoring social media accounts of rich people and using their sensitive information to ask for large amount of money in order to not leak the breached data.
4. Morphing the original pictures and videos to extort money from the victim.
5. Using ransomeware to encrypt the data such as banking details, pictures and other files and then demanding money to decrypt it.

While these are some of the common methods of cyber extortion, you should be alert and vigilant enough while using the internet and proactive enough to get a good cyber insurance coverage, which gives you an option to get insured against any cyber-attack.

Cyber insurance protects you against 10 potential threats namely identity theft, social media liability, cyber stalking, malware attack, IT theft loss, phishing, email spoofing, media liability, cyber extortion and privacy and data breach by third party, all in one policy.

While Cyber Extortion is just one threat discussed here, there are many other types of cyber-attacks that may cause you financial and emotional problems. Visit our website or contact our executives to learn more about CyberSafe insurance. Opt for the right plan to get covered against cyber-attacks.