L Squared Agency is a nationwide agency that specializes in professional liability insurance. Because many of our clients need access to surplus lines insurers, L Squared also is a surplus lines broker in many states. All surplus lines policies need to be reported to each state when written by a surplus lines broker. Taxes for those policies are then remitted to each state by the surplus lines broker. One of those states that we do filings in is Idaho through the Idaho Surplus Lines Association Portal. Without the portal policies are not reported and taxes are not billed.
Ransomware attacks have not gone away. If anything they have gotten more frequent. Many times the ransomware is delivered via an employee or a trusted vendor that you interface with. As to can see from the following ransomware can put you out of business for days if not weeks.
Do you have cyber insurance that provides coverage for your firm’s down time and restoration costs? Normally your business owners policy will not provide business interruption coverage for a cyber loss. See the following notice that we received. Bad new is as of April 17, they are still trying to recover.
“RANSOMWARE NOTICE - SLA IDAHO SUBMISSION FILING SITE
ATTN: SURPLUS LINE BROKERS
Thank you for your patience while the Idaho SLA submission site is disabled. We were hit with a new type of virus on April 3, transmitted through an affidavit attachment. The experts are working diligently to clean and restore. We will notify you immediately when we know all is well and security protocol is restored. Unfortunately, as of today, we cannot give you a date certain when the broker portal will be available for submissions…trying for week’s end but we have discovered this is more laborious than anticipated. It was a grievous virus which mandates a thorough cleansing and manual restoration of hundreds of files. The virus also compromised our Microsoft SQL configuration which further impedes our progress in getting back to business. Our techs are confident none of your customer data has been compromised. The ransomware effected a fast, bulk file encryption back to March 13 to extort payment – not to extract specific information.
We understand this incident is putting you on hold – delinquent submissions and payments will not be flagged late this month due to down time. We always encourage brokers to audit broker summary reports monthly, but it is especially important to verify your filings at close of April business to help us ensure we have restored and/or recovered all submissions.
We apologize for this terrific inconvenience! “
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Contact Me Today
Lee Norcross, MBA, CPCU
Managing Director, CEO
(616) 940-1101 Ext. 7080 |