As we are preparing to sit down with family and friends to celebrate Thanksgiving, we wanted to take a moment and share some of what the ALS Team is thankful for the 2021 holiday season: 

As air travel for the upcoming Thanksgiving weekend spiked to pre-pandemic levels and AAA estimates over 53 million people will hit the road this holiday, the Cybersecurit

y & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and FBI issued an advisory yesterday, warning critical infrastructure partners that malicious cyber actors tend to strike during holiday weekends.

“Although neither CISA nor the FBI currently have identified any specific threats, recent 2021 trends show malicious cyber actors launching serious and impactful ransomware attacks during holidays and weekends.”

General Liability insurance covers various parties, and this includes named insureds and additional insureds. As risk managers, many people ask us about the difference between additional insureds and named insureds and how it affects them, which we highlight in this blog.

What is a Named Insured?

In a liability insurance policy, the named insured is the policyholder covered under the policy. The policyholder is covered for their legal liability that results in damages as a result of an occurrence. Many liability policies issued to a businesses will cover one named insured, usually, the corporation itself, but there is an opportunity to cover other related entities the insured would like and extend the coverage.

Email has been a part of our everyday life for quite some time now. These days with some restrictions imposed on face-to-face interaction, email has become an effective way to communicate. As a result of this the number of emails sent and received daily has been steadily increasing each year. According to Campaign Monitor an average person sends and receives 121 business emails per day. While, this is an effective way to communicate, handling such an amount of emails can become a challenge if one does not have a strategy of how to manage them. Managing incoming emails and ensuring that emails you send are effective is important in this digital age.

This year has been filled with a multitude of both challenges and victories. Every year is different but in 2020 we have had to deal with more change than normal. The business world is evolving quickly, and risk management has been changing along with it. In 2021, a resilient and resourceful approach to risk management will be front and center as businesses navigate the “work from home” landscape, deal with the effects of the pandemic, and change the insurance market for years to come.

As most of this year’s holidays, Thanksgiving is completely different for, pretty much, all of us. This year has certainly tested us all. As risk managers, we usually address risks and suggest mitigation strategies in most of our blogs. This year, however, we decided to look at the positives and think about what we are thankful for during this, strange Thanksgiving holiday.

With winter just around the corner and many areas already seeing flurries,  this would be a good opportunity to remind everyone of the risks surrounding claims from accidents due to snow and ice. As many companies are considering their snow removal contracts and vendor arrangements, there are a few key points in our latest article that might be helpful.

The idea for this blog was conceived by Marshall Ma, who joined The ALS Group as a Risk Management Intern and now provides support on client accounts as Technical Analyst, based on the Chinese ideogram for “crisis”. It just happens that Marshall is fluent in Mandarin and is passionate about risk management. She is an Enterprise Risk Management Graduate and Lecturer at Columbia University. While at Columbia, Marshall spent a lot of time working on campus educating her peers and supporting industry outreach. She also participated in risk assessment and mitigation for the campus’ internal Career Design Lab.

As companies think about their supply chain and the risks that are inherent with that area, a good place to start is with your contract terms with the supplier – what are the terms you want? What are the terms you have agreed to?

With the unsettling state of affairs of the world today, a manufacturer or distributor has to be properly vetted and the terms of supply carefully considered. What is an acceptable delay or non-delivery? 

Over the last decade, social media has quickly become a prominent way for businesses to advertise, communicate, and educate. On the flip side, it can be a huge risk for those businesses that cannot keep up with the ever changing tools and trends in privacy, security, and marketing. We often see businesses and even public figures falling prey to social engineering scams, ransomware, hacking, and a multitude of other cyber risks. Luckily, with some planning and diligence, mitigating these risks can be quite simple. Below are examples of some threats as well as solutions you can implement now that will help protect your business from some of the most prevalent social media threats.