Cybersecurity insurance is becoming scarce, but there’s a lot you can do to secure your business

If your business is looking for cybersecurity insurance, you may want to read the fine print when it’s time to renew your policy.

As with so many things today, the trend is toward paying a lot more and receiving a lot less.

Cybersecurity insurance premiums have risen dramatically in recent years. At the same time, major underwriters are beginning to place limits on coverage. A major driver behind these trends is a surge in insurance payouts, particularly for ransomware attacks.

In December 2000, 20th Century Fox released the inexplicably successful Dude, Where’s My Car?, a motion picture so puerile that the Chicago Tribune suggested audiences would leave the theater exclaiming, “Dude, I can’t believe I sat through that movie!” During that same week, a tech startup named Google released its toolbar extension, integrating its cutting-edge “page rank” search engine into browsers.

Google’s subsequent meteoric rise gave us the industry of search engine optimization, whose practitioners soon discovered a principle long embraced by Hollywood: You’ll never go broke giving people what they want.