Enhancing The Role Of Insurance In Cyber Risk Management

This report provides an overview of the financial impact of cyber incidents, the coverage of cyber risk available in the insurance market, the challenges to market development and initiatives to address those challenges.

The digital transformation of economic activities is creating significant opportunities for innovation, convenience and efficiency. However, recent major incidents have highlighted the digital security and privacy protection risks that come with an increased reliance on digital technologies. While not a substitute for investing in cyber security and risk management, insurance coverage for cyber risk can make a significant contribution to the management of cyber risk by promoting awareness about exposure to cyber losses, sharing expertise on risk management, encouraging investment in risk reduction and facilitating the response to cyber incidents. This report provides an overview of the financial impact of cyber incidents, the coverage of cyber risk available in the insurance market, the challenges to market development and initiatives to address those challenges. It includes a number of policy recommendations which support the development of the cyber insurance market and contribute to improving the management of cyber risk.

Tackling the cybersecurity challenge is a matter of survival for society at large. Cyber attacks are rapidly increasing in sophistication and magnitude—and in their destructive potential. New threats emerge regularly, the last few years having seen a ransomware boom and distributed denial-of-service attacks leveraging the Internet of Things. For organisations, the use of cybersecurity risk management is essential in order to manage these threats. Yet current frameworks have drawbacks which can lead to the suboptimal allocation of cybersecurity resources. Cyber insurance has been touted as part of the solution – based on the idea that insurers can incentivize companies to improve their cybersecurity by offering premium discounts – but cyber insurance levels remain limited. This is because companies have difficulty determining which cyber insurance products to purchase, and insurance companies struggle to accurately assess cyber risk and thus develop cyber insurance products. To deal with these challenges, this volume presents new models for cybersecurity risk management, partly based on the use of cyber insurance. It contains: A set of mathematical models for cybersecurity risk management, including (i) a model to assist companies in determining their optimal budget allocation between security products and cyber insurance and (ii) a model to assist insurers in designing cyber insurance products. The models use adversarial risk analysis to account for the behavior of threat actors (as well as the behavior of companies and insurers). To inform these models, we draw on psychological and behavioural economics studies of decision-making by individuals regarding cybersecurity and cyber insurance. We also draw on organizational decision-making studies involving cybersecurity and cyber insurance. Its theoretical and methodological findings will appeal to researchers across a wide range of cybersecurity-related disciplines including risk and decision analysis, analytics, technology management, actuarial sciences, behavioural sciences, and economics. The practical findings will help cybersecurity professionals and insurers enhance cybersecurity and cyber insurance, thus benefiting society as a whole. This book grew out of a two-year European Union-funded project under Horizons 2020, called CYBECO (Supporting Cyber Insurance from a Behavioral Choice Perspective).

The non-technical handbook for cyber security risk management Solving Cyber Risk distills a decade of research into a practical framework for cyber security. Blending statistical data and cost information with research into the culture, psychology, and business models of the hacker community, this book provides business executives, policy-makers, and individuals with a deeper understanding of existing future threats, and an action plan for safeguarding their organizations. Key Risk Indicators reveal vulnerabilities based on organization type, IT infrastructure and existing security measures, while expert discussion from leading cyber risk specialists details practical, real-world methods of risk reduction and mitigation. By the nature of the business, your organization’s customer database is packed with highly sensitive information that is essentially hacker-bait, and even a minor flaw in security protocol could spell disaster. This book takes you deep into the cyber threat landscape to show you how to keep your data secure. Understand who is carrying out cyber-attacks, and why Identify your organization’s risk of attack and vulnerability to damage Learn the most cost-effective risk reduction measures Adopt a new cyber risk assessment and quantification framework based on techniques used by the insurance industry By applying risk management principles to cyber security, non-technical leadership gains a greater understanding of the types of threat, level of threat, and level of investment needed to fortify the organization against attack. Just because you have not been hit does not mean your data is safe, and hackers rely on their targets’ complacence to help maximize their haul. Solving Cyber Risk gives you a concrete action plan for implementing top-notch preventative measures before you’re forced to implement damage control.

Cyber-attacks on financial institutions and financial market infrastructures are becoming more common and more sophisticated. Risk awareness has been increasing, firms actively manage cyber risk and invest in cybersecurity, and to some extent transfer and pool their risks through cyber liability insurance policies. This paper considers the properties of cyber risk, discusses why the private market can fail to provide the socially optimal level of cybersecurity, and explore how systemic cyber risk interacts with other financial stability risks. Furthermore, this study examines the current regulatory frameworks and supervisory approaches, and identifies information asymmetries and other inefficiencies that hamper the detection and management of systemic cyber risk. The paper concludes discussing policy measures that can increase the resilience of the financial system to systemic cyber risk.

Actionable guidance and expert perspective for real-world cybersecurity The Cyber Risk Handbook is the practitioner's guide to implementing, measuring and improving the counter-cyber capabilities of the modern enterprise. The first resource of its kind, this book provides authoritative guidance for real-world situations, and cross-functional solutions for enterprise-wide improvement. Beginning with an overview of counter-cyber evolution, the discussion quickly turns practical with design and implementation guidance for the range of capabilities expected of a robust cyber risk management system that is integrated with the enterprise risk management (ERM) system. Expert contributors from around the globe weigh in on specialized topics with tools and techniques to help any type or size of organization create a robust system tailored to its needs. Chapter summaries of required capabilities are aggregated to provide a new cyber risk maturity model used to benchmark capabilities and to road-map gap-improvement. Cyber risk is a fast-growing enterprise risk, not just an IT risk. Yet seldom is guidance provided as to what this means. This book is the first to tackle in detail those enterprise-wide capabilities expected by Board, CEO and Internal Audit, of the diverse executive management functions that need to team up with the Information Security function in order to provide integrated solutions. Learn how cyber risk management can be integrated to better protect your enterprise Design and benchmark new and improved practical counter-cyber capabilities Examine planning and implementation approaches, models, methods, and more Adopt a new cyber risk maturity model tailored to your enterprise needs The need to manage cyber risk across the enterprise—inclusive of the IT operations—is a growing concern as massive data breaches make the news on an alarmingly frequent basis. With a cyber risk management system now a business-necessary requirement, practitioners need to assess the effectiveness of their current system, and measure its gap-improvement over time in response to a dynamic and fast-moving threat landscape. The Cyber Risk Handbook brings the world's best thinking to bear on aligning that system to the enterprise and vice-a-versa. Every functional head of any organization must have a copy at-hand to understand their role in achieving that alignment.

Why cyberinsurance has not improved cybersecurity and what governments can do to make it a more effective tool for cyber risk management. As cybersecurity incidents—ranging from data breaches and denial-of-service attacks to computer fraud and ransomware—become more common, a cyberinsurance industry has emerged to provide coverage for any resulting liability, business interruption, extortion payments, regulatory fines, or repairs. In this book, Josephine Wolff offers the first comprehensive history of cyberinsurance, from the early “Internet Security Liability” policies in the late 1990s to the expansive coverage offered today. Drawing on legal records, government reports, cyberinsurance policies, and interviews with regulators and insurers, Wolff finds that cyberinsurance has not improved cybersecurity or reduced cyber risks. Wolff examines the development of cyberinsurance, comparing it to other insurance sectors, including car and flood insurance; explores legal disputes between insurers and policyholders about whether cyber-related losses were covered under policies designed for liability, crime, or property and casualty losses; and traces the trend toward standalone cyberinsurance policies and government efforts to regulate and promote the industry. Cyberinsurance, she argues, is ineffective at curbing cybersecurity losses because it normalizes the payment of online ransoms, whereas the goal of cybersecurity is the opposite—to disincentivize such payments to make ransomware less profitable. An industry built on modeling risk has found itself confronted by new technologies before the risks posed by those technologies can be fully understood.

Cyber risk is the second highest perceived business risk according to U.S. risk managers and corporate insurance experts. Digital assets now represent over 85% of an organization’s value. In a survey of Fortune 1000 organizations, 83% surveyed described cyber risk as an organizationally complex topic, with most using only qualitative metrics that provide little, if any insight into an effective cyber strategy. Written by one of the foremost cyber risk experts in the world and with contributions from other senior professionals in the field, Managing Cyber Risk provides corporate cyber stakeholders – managers, executives, and directors – with context and tools to accomplish several strategic objectives. These include enabling managers to understand and have proper governance oversight of this crucial area and ensuring improved cyber resilience. Managing Cyber Risk helps businesses to understand cyber risk quantification in business terms that lead risk owners to determine how much cyber insurance they should buy based on the size and the scope of policy, the cyber budget required, and how to prioritize risk remediation based on reputational, operational, legal, and financial impacts. Directors are held to standards of fiduciary duty, loyalty, and care. These insights provide the ability to demonstrate that directors have appropriately discharged their duties, which often dictates the ability to successfully rebut claims made against such individuals. Cyber is a strategic business issue that requires quantitative metrics to ensure cyber resiliency. This handbook acts as a roadmap for executives to understand how to increase cyber resiliency and is unique since it quantifies exposures at the digital asset level.