Imagine that someone hacked into your Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter account and started posting malicious or derogatory comments using your personal or business profile.

Not only could the damage to your reputation be catastrophic, but you could also face a lengthy uphill battle to regain control of your account and bring legal action against the hackers responsible for the digital crime.

So it is perhaps surprising that only now has someone finally come up with a way to help victims to redress the situation – through a new type of insurance cover that provides legal advice and support in the event of an online attack on the policyholder’s social media account.

The specialist cover, which costs £3.99 a month, has just been launched by UK-based privacy protection company ALLOW and offers up to £10,000 in professional fees or £3,500 in reputational damages for any one incident.

Cybercrime of this nature appears to be on the increase and so this new service should prove popular with PR-savvy companies and individuals that see the importance of mitigating the damaging consequences that social media hijacking can bring.

It is believed that around half a million Facebook accounts are hacked every single day, with many high-profile figures and leading brands affected, including international news agency Reuters and actress and singer-songwriter Rita Ora.

But there is one current exclusion that such an insurance policy will never cover. And that is for the kind of self-inflicted reputational damage that many people bring upon on themselves simply by failing to think before they tweet or post.

So, in the event that any of our own clients decide to take out the insurance cover, we will always see it as our PR duty to remind them to stay on guard – not just for potential hackers but also about what they say on social networks themselves.