Is a excessive cyber insurance coverage premium about your danger, or your insurer’s?

A sky-high premium might not at all times mirror your organization’s safety posture

08 Aug 2025
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3 min. learn

When a cyber danger insurance coverage quote lands in your desk and the premium is sky excessive, it’s pure to imagine that the insurer is judging your setting to be excessive danger. So, when the following quote lands and is extra acceptable, does it imply they considered your danger otherwise?

In accordance with one of many many cyber insurance coverage displays at Black Hat USA 2025, the rationale might not be so apparent: it might be that the insurer is limiting its danger publicity to a services or products you employ, moderately than discovering a danger inside your setting.

To be extra particular, an insurer might want to restrict its publicity to a sure vendor in your provide chain. For instance, think about they resolve that acceptable danger is for less than 60% of their policyholders to make use of product X. If what you are promoting have been to push them over this restrict, they might simply worth themselves out of what you are promoting with a excessive quote, moderately than declining you.

The chance, due to this fact, isn’t along with your setting – it’s with the provider. In reality, there might not even be a particular danger with them. It might simply be {that a} danger restrict set by the insurer has been reached.

As customers, we are able to see this in apply. After I use a automotive insurance coverage comparability web site, the premium quantities fluctuate by as a lot as 200%. But my danger is similar to all insurers, and it’s doubtless that some insurers are capping their danger publicity to sure automotive producers by pricing themselves out of the market.

Because the cyber insurance coverage and cybersecurity industries turn into additional entwined, the data-based insights from insurers’ claims can – and will – enhance cybersecurity posture for everybody concerned, not simply the insured. As a cybersecurity skilled, I assume that multi-factor-authentication is default ‘ON’ for any firm offering their workers distant entry by way of an SSL VPN.

My assumption, although, is way from appropriate. A statistic shared throughout a presentation revealed that within the first six months of 2025, 45% of latest cyber claims have been a results of an SSL VPN missing MFA. That is surprising for 2 causes: firstly, why do insurers present insurance policies to firms that haven’t any MFA given the danger of a declare, and secondly, why would any firm not safe their SSL VPN with MFA?

What claims information reveals

In accordance with information offered by Coalition, 55% of all ransomware assaults are initiated by means of a fringe safety gadget. And in claims the place the strategy used is thought, there’s a clear winner: credential theft.

Whereas ransomware dominates the dialogue, there was excellent news offered. Coalition’s efforts to claw again funds from fraudulent transfers do have some success. In 2024, they managed to get well $31 million, utilizing varied strategies that embrace alerting authorities contacts, acquiring injunctions to freeze funds and interesting specialised disaster response specialists. This claw-back averages at $278,000 per occasion, with 24% of all occasions gaining some claw-back and 12% of occasions getting the entire quantity again.

The cyber insurance coverage trade continues its efforts to scale back its publicity to claims, and the displays from varied insurers display that they’re going to new lengths to attain this. Relying on their coverage, the insured can now profit from varied providers offered by the insurer, together with personalized cyber menace intelligence based mostly on the insured’s particular setting. That is complemented by monitoring and alerting their shoppers when a brand new vulnerability is posted to the CVE database; particularly, the insurer will alert the insured the place they know the software program or {hardware} is in use and supply steerage on the anticipated patching timeline.

This proactive strategy to scale back danger even extends on to the darkish net, the place insurers might buy compromised credentials or, in some cases, purchase zero-day vulnerabilities to guard their insured shoppers and, much more importantly, cut back the insurer’s monetary danger.

Because the insurance coverage and cybersecurity industries proceed to overlap, the query for me is: simply how far will the overlap go?