Cyber risks for insurers: There's a target on your back
Tom Egglestone, international claims leader in the UK and Europe for Resilience, discusses the cyber vulnerabilities and issues insurers should focus on for themselves and their policyholders in this podcast.
Cyber terrorists are equal-opportunity attackers. They have targeted businesses ranging from small mom & pop enterprises and sole-proprietorships to hospitals, schools, government entities, multi-national corporations, and even insurance companies. CNA, Aon and Lloyd’s of London are just several of the insurance entities targeted by ransomware attacks and hackers.
Cyberattacks can be state-sponsored by foreign governments, the work of gangs who have made ransomware a very successful business model, or by other bad actors seeking money, information, or intent on disrupting the operations of a business.
Insurers have become prime targets for all of these reasons, and Tom Egglestone who is the international claims leader, UK and Europe for Resilience, joins us in this edition of Insurance Speak to help unpack some of the risks and understand why insurers are frequently the object of these attacks. Egglestone has specialized in cyber insurance for the past seven years and has handled some of the most complex cyber incidents within the London Market.
He shares that “insurers and other financial institutions will be targets because of the level of data they hold. The majority of threat actors are interested in money and the information they can obtain.”
This often means that bad actors want to leverage the data so they can obtain a ransom payment or take the information and use it some other way for financial gain such as combining it with other records found on the dark web.
Interestingly, insurers do have cyber insurance as well as other risk transfer solutions to help them protect their data and mitigate the damage from any attacks.
Egglestone also discusses the pros and cons of paying any ransom demands, highlights other tactics hackers are using to attack companies and explains how he sees cyber risks evolving in the coming months.
To learn more about the cyber risks insurers face, listen to the podcast above or subscribe to Insurance Speak on Spotify, Apple Music or Libsyn.
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