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City approves $180,015 annual cyber liability insurance after staff cites past multi‑month outage
Summary
The council approved a $180,015.47 per-year cyber liability insurance policy through broker Insurica; staff said the city experienced major downtime from a 2017 cyber incident and that the policy will provide recovery resources and hardware replacement coverage.
The Lawton City Council approved purchase of a cyber liability insurance policy at an annual cost of $180,015.47 through the city's broker, Insurica.
Judy (Neighborhood/IT liaison) and an Insurica representative explained why the city needs the coverage, referencing a significant August 2017 cyber incident that produced extensive downtime. Judy said equipment replacement alone in 2017 exceeded $1.5 million in 2017 dollars and that recovery disrupted operations and forced some manual, pen-and-paper work for weeks. "With this insurance, it will allow us — it will give us the tools, the services to bring the city back to a whole again at a quicker rate," she said. When pressed for an estimate of 2017 total cost, staff indicated the financial disruption ran into millions in 2017 dollars.
Staff characterized municipal governments as frequent targets of foreign-state and criminal cyber actors and described coverage as including replacement hardware, incident response services and other extra services to reduce downtime.
A council motion to approve the insurance passed 8–0.
Council action: approved purchase of cyber liability insurance policy for $180,015.47 per year through Insurica (agenda item 40). Staff said the policy covers hardware replacement and incident response services and will reduce downtime in the event of future cyberattacks.
