While I've heard insurance professionals agree that to consider cyber risk solely as a standalone peril is a false premise, there is still a long way to go before the industry reaches a consensus on how to holistically handle this risk.
The discussion during the "Blurred Lines: The wider impact of cyber risk" session at the Advisen Cyber Risk Insights conference in New York last week was a great demonstration of how different types of expertise are needed to fully analyze the impact of cyber risk on both standalone cyber insurance products as well as other property and casualty lines of business.
The panel, including Chris Beck, Executive Risk Consultant at Milliman and Brad Gow, Global Cyber Product Leader at Sompo International, explored the very real vulnerabilities of the maritime industry to cyber attacks. Hearing the huge breadth of potential scenarios incorporating different targets, threat actors, vulnerabilities, impacts, and objectives gave me pause for thought.
It's sobering sometimes to consider the amount of work that goes into developing credible, robust scenarios for cyber catastrophe modeling across industries and insurance coverage lines.
CyberCube's team of experts brings knowledge and skills from various walks of life including cyber security (government and civilian), economic modelling, industrial attacks, threat intelligence, security control frameworks, defense systems, underwriting and actuarial...just to name a few! Each member brings a unique point of view that helps to craft realistic, relevant, and potent scenarios to inform CyberCube's view of potential catastrophic accumulation events.
Having this collective allows the team to identify and alleviate potential blind spots.
The industry needs to heed the sentiment behind one of the statements made by Brad, "Cyber is baked into the exposure. Maybe it's wise to spend time with the property underwriting teams to look at resiliency." It's not just the property experts that cyber insurance teams can learn from. There's knowledge to be gained from across the board of our property and casualty colleagues.
If you'd like to read more about scenarios and see some of the inputs CyberCube uses to inform it's view of risk, read 'Building a Forward-Looking View of Risk' here https://www.cybcube.com/resources/