Cyber insurance to help boost cyber resilience

The first quarter of 2023 has seen first signs of the cyber insurance market cooling down. Cyber risks remain a top concern for boards of directors of all organizations, regardless of size or activity. This has motivated organizations to reconsider security strategies and improve their resilience against cyber risks.

Over the past couple of years, WTW and insurers have invested heavily to increase the knowledge within their cyber risk teams. As prices and deductibles rose over the past three years due to the limited capacity available on the cyber insurance market and the increased loss ratios, cyber risk awareness across organizations rose at the same rate. Insurers have improved the way they provide feedback and WTW is using extensive data to help clients decide not only on the cyber security strategies but also on the risk transfer strategies.

Cyber analytics as a service

Hard market circumstances have forced clients and brokers to reconsider how they protect against and transfer cyber risk to the insurance market. At the same time, cyber criminality evolves at a very fast rate. AI is helping cyber criminals to increase both reach and success rate of cyber-attacks.

Cyber-attacks are also increasingly being used as a weapon by rogue governments and terrorist groups. Hackers are targeting more critical infrastructure such as taking down a power plant, a port or a pipeline, which potentially has a huge adverse effect on society as a whole.

While a new balance seems to be forming on the cyber insurance market, insurers and clients stay vigilant to ensure the fast-evolving threat landscape doesn’t lead to new market imbalance. WTW, as an analytical broker, puts data at the service of our clients. We provide state of the art analytical tools to deliver insight into our clients’ cyber risks which in turn helps them to decide on the best possible risk transfer strategy.

A 3-step approach

1. In the first phase WTW will assess the risk and present this to the market. Our Cyber Risk Services team offers a wide range of risk assessment services but can also help complete a CISO, interpret questionnaires, and prepare for an underwriting roadshow.
2. In the second phase WTW will run the analytical tools. These tools are designed to use data to provide insights into the client’s potential risks:
   • Cyber Quantified is a proprietary WTW tool that quantifies cyber risk, both privacy risk and network outage risk to highlight the annual and single incident losses the client can expect. The tool provides the possibility to test the cyber insurance program and renewal options to decide which program will provide the optimal return.
   • Security Scorecard is a partner of WTW and provides a detailed security scorecard report. This report highlights the security of the public domain and gives access to the Security Scorecard tool. Based on this scorecard it is possible to improve scores.
   • As insurance companies have added co-insurance clauses to limit exposure to certain cyber risks such as ransomware, WTW has developed the Total Cost of Risk tool to show how such clauses will impact in case of a claim and to help decide on the optimum insurance program.
   • A new and powerful Cyber Benchmarking tool is able to compare placement strategies to that of peer organizations.

The output of all these tools are clear and concise reports that can easily be interpretated by board of directors and decision makers

3. In the final phase, WTW will deploy our market leading broking services to provide clients with an optimal risk transfer. For multinational organizations or complex risks, this service can also be deployed cross border.

The three-step process is a flowing 360 degree model which means that the different steps flow into each other and previous steps can be revisited later on in the process.

As the renewal of a cyber risk insurance program nowadays usually means that the risk is re-underwritten every year, the same process starts immediately after the program is placed or renewed.

For further details or additional questions, please do not hesitate to contact our WTW Cyber experts in the contact details below.