Colleges and universities face complex issues when a breach occurs. You maintain personal data on applicants, students, faculty and other employees, donors, trustees, and board members, who often reside in different states with different breach notification laws. Educational institutions with health clinics may also be subject to the breach notification requirements imposed by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH). These laws require time-consuming and labor-intensive internal investigations, the expertise of specialised outside vendors, and can create a public relations nightmare.

The publicity and consumer dissatisfaction that surround a data breach have spurred a wave of class action complaints against organisations big and small. Relying on a variety of privacy laws, enterprising plaintiffs’ lawyers have filed complaints seeking billions of dollars in damages. The risk of crippling damages, and the sizeable costs of litigation, often push organisations to settle even in the absence of any clear harm to the affected individuals.

State and federal regulators have made one point clear: a significant breach of information will result in monetary penalties, onerous corrective action plans, and on-going audits. Whether through the strict data privacy and security requirements of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), or the increasing interest of state attorneys general in enforcing privacy laws, the regulatory landscape for higher education institutions carries an immense amount of risk.

In addition to covering your business, BBR also protects your partners though third party coverage.  Third party coverage includes:

• Third party information security and privacy coverage with up to $15M in limits in addition to the breach response coverage
• Regulatory defense and penalties
• Website and offline media liability
• PCI fines, penalties and assessments
• Cyber extortion
• First party business interruption and data protection with limits up to $15 million.

Beazley, a leading insurer of technology and information security risks, has developed Beazley Breach Response (BBR), a solution to privacy breaches and information security exposures tailored to the needs of higher education. BBR is a complete privacy breach response management and information security insurance solution, which includes a range of services designed to help you respond to an actual or suspected data breach incident effectively, efficiently, and in compliance with the law. Numerous colleges and universities have turned to Beazley to help coordinate their response to data breaches.