Cyber ​​insurance on the rise in the world

As companies become increasingly digital, cyber incidents cost more every day and this has forced insurers to adapt and promote insurance against cyber risks and these will even have an impact in Mexico and Latin America.

According to Tony Anscombe, chief security evangelist at Eset, the cost of cybercrime stood at 1.5 trillion dollars in the world at the end of 2018, a figure that experts estimate will increase to 13.8 trillion by 2028.

If a large company has a cyber incident that cost it 10 or 20 million dollars, it can deal with it with its profits, but when it happens to a smaller company, it is more difficult to solve,” he explained when speaking with Excelsior.

Due to the above, insurers began to develop insurance against cyber risks that help cover the different costs generated by these incidents.

The latter means that affected companies that have insurance of this type will have resources to continue their operations, face regulatory fines and have resources to recover affected systems and devices.

Anscombe recalled the case of Change Healthcare in the United States, an intermediation platform for insurance claims to medical providers that was attacked by ransomware.

This attack affected the country’s entire health system because the ransomware prevented different health centers from being able to verify that a client had valid health insurance.

Unfortunately, Change Healthcare paid $22 million to cybercriminals to release the systems, adding to the total loss from the incident, which amounted to $900 million.

That’s why I think cyber insurance is starting to grow, because companies acquire it as help and in the case of smaller companies it’s about surviving,” he highlighted.

The forecasts

The above because, according to a recent study by Eset, the value of the cyber insurance industry has gone from 7.2 billion dollars in 2020 to 13.8 billion in 2024.

Currently, insurers offer cyber insurance policies that can cover everything from data security incidents such as theft of personal information; cyber attacks against the network or against business data; terrorist attacks; against legal claims or regulatory investigations due to a cybersecurity incident, among others.

For the evangelist of Eset, something very important is also to offer education about these insurances that are increasingly necessary. Proof of this is the case of a school that received a cybersecurity attack, but surprisingly had contracted cyber insurance.

Anscombe found that the school had taken out such insurance for the wrong reasons, those in charge thought that the insurance offered cybersecurity and, therefore, they had no measures to protect them.

He also considered that the adoption of these insurances generates new challenges for companies because they must be more transparent and have their data in order so that insurers can analyze your case and determine how much and what their policy will cover.

Cyber ​​insurance may not be as popular today in Mexico, but it is coming,” he added.

This is because companies will realize that these insurances are as important as having earthquake insurance for the building.

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