Cyber Insolvency Risk Assessment
A cyberattack rarely bankrupts a business through the ransom itself — it's the cascade that follows: downtime, customers walking away, direct response and legal costs, regulatory exposure, and financing that dries up at the worst moment. This free self-assessment scores your exposure across all five of those death-spiral dimensions and gives you a plain-English verdict, your biggest weaknesses, and the fixes that buy the most resilience. Everything runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
Business
Dependence & exposure
Controls (these reduce your risk)
Death-spiral breakdown
The verdict
A single serious cyber incident could realistically push this business toward insolvency. Your weakest front is "direct-cost absorption", and with little margin for error the cascade — downtime, lost customers, direct costs, legal exposure and shaken financing — could outrun your ability to absorb it. Treat the top fixes below as urgent.
How hard a prolonged outage hits you, net of tested offline backups and segmentation that let you recover and contain.
How much revenue walks out the door after a breach — driven by customer concentration, trust-based relationships, and the sensitivity of data you hold.
Whether the balance sheet can swallow the one-off hit (response, legal, recovery), given your cash runway, size, and insurance.
Exposure to class actions, regulatory fines, and mandatory-notification costs from the volume of regulated data you hold and your sector.
The risk that lenders or investors pull support — triggered by existing distress, covenant-reporting obligations, and a thin cash buffer.
Top 3 weaknesses to fix first
- 1Direct-cost absorption85/100
Get cyber insurance sized to your real exposure (incident response, legal, notification, business interruption) — it is the single fastest way to make a six-/seven-figure hit survivable.
- 2Operational paralysis80/100
Stand up immutable/offline backups and actually test a full restore end-to-end — an untested backup is a hope, not a control. Target a recovery-time objective you have proven, not assumed.
- 3Customer flight78/100
Diversify revenue so no single client can sink you, and brief your top accounts on your security posture now — contractual trust is easier to keep than to rebuild after an incident.
Firms like these didn't survive
Real, publicly-reported cases — described accurately and shown here purely to illustrate how the death spiral plays out. They are not predictions about your business, and every situation has many contributing factors.
A medical-billing collections firm disclosed an eight-month breach of its payment portal. Its major clients — Quest Diagnostics, LabCorp and others — cut ties, and the company filed for bankruptcy within weeks, citing the cost of notifying millions of patients and the loss of its anchor clients.
Lesson: Customer flight, not the breach itself, ended the company — when a handful of clients are most of your revenue, losing their trust is fatal.
The data-broker parent of National Public Data filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after a breach exposing billions of records, facing around 20 class-action lawsuits plus FTC and multi-state regulatory scrutiny it said it could not afford to defend.
Lesson: Litigation and regulatory exposure can be the direct cause of insolvency — the legal bill for holding sensitive data at scale can exceed the whole business.
A 158-year-old UK transport group entered administration after a ransomware attack, reported to have started from a single weak/guessed password. Around 730 jobs were lost; the firm could not secure the funding needed to recover.
Lesson: One weak credential cascaded into operational paralysis and a financing gap — basic controls (MFA) and recovery funding are existential, not optional.
The US arm of the spirits group filed for Chapter 11. A ransomware attack crippled its systems and, among other pressures, left it unable to produce the financial reporting its lenders required — contributing to a default.
Lesson: A breach that blocks lender reporting can trigger a financing collapse: downtime becomes a covenant breach becomes insolvency.
Disclaimer: This is an educational self-assessment designed to prompt better risk conversations — it is not financial, credit, insurance, or legal advice, and it does not predict bankruptcy. Scores are indicative only and based on the inputs you provide. Nothing you enter is uploaded or stored; the entire assessment runs in your browser. For decisions that matter, consult qualified professionals.