Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Monday February 18 2019, @08:36AM   Printer-friendly
from the GIMO:-Garbage-in-Money-out dept.

Picked via cryptogram, with the original here

...with reliance on all things digital skyrocketing, cyber threats now pose grave, even existential, dangers to corporations as well as the entire digital economy. In response, companies have begun to develop a cyber insurance market, offering corporations a mechanism to manage their exposure to these risks. Yet the prospects for this market now seem uncertain in light of a major court battle. Mondelez International is reportedly suing Zurich Insurance in Illinois state court for refusing to pay its $100 million claim for damages caused by the 2017 NotPetya attack.

Mondelez's claim represents just a fraction of the billions of dollars in collateral damage caused by NotPetya, a destructive, indiscriminate cyberattack of unprecedented scale, widely suspected to have been launched by Russia with the aim of hurting Ukraine and its business partners... According to reports, Zurich apparently rejected Mondelez's claim on the grounds that NotPetya was an act of war and, therefore, excluded from coverage under its policy agreement. If the question of whether and how war risk exemptions apply is left to the courts to decide on a case-by-case basis, this creates a profound source of uncertainty for policyholders about the coverage they obtain.
...
Many hurdles stand in the way of insurance providing a more robust solution. Data on cyber risks are scarce, and the threat is evolving constantly, often rendering data obsolete before they can be used. That means actuaries lack a credible repository of information to accurately price cyber risk. Moreover, NotPetya and other attacks with cascading effects have reinforced fears of aggregation risk, meaning the potential for a single incident to cause simultaneous losses across multiple policyholders. If Zurich had underwritten even a handful of the major corporations disrupted by the attack, it could have faced catastrophic losses from just one incident. This is a particularly acute concern for reinsurers—companies that provide stop-loss coverage, or protection against unsustainably costly claims, to other insurers—making both reinsurers and primary cyber insurance providers naturally hesitant to support more extensive cyber underwriting. The lack of adequate reinsurance backing means that carriers may become overwhelmed with claims if a systemic cyber incident causes simultaneous losses across many policyholders.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @09:03AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @09:03AM (#802852)

    (Something extremely nasty) Molendez!! They are corporate pirates who make promises and then backstab. One example is the Cadbury's debacle in New Zealand - (google it) - but that is only one of many such tricks they have perpetrated around the world. They deserve no mercy, no insurance money and should be boycotted wherever possible. Sadly they also sucked up Toblerone into their galactic chocolate empire :( ..but I can survive without Toblerone if I have to.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @10:36AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 18 2019, @10:36AM (#802896)

    They are corporate pirates who make promises and then backstab.

    That's so ironic. Molendez was just saying the same thing about Zurich Insurance. Someone pop in the Atlantis Marmoset cassette ...