Cyber Insurance and its Contribution to Cyber Risk Mitigation

Cyber Insurance and its Contribution to Cyber Risk Mitigation

The rise in both the scale and severity of recent cyberattacks demands new thinking about cybersecurity risk and the mitigation and transfer of that risk. Cyber insurance is one potential way to manage risk by transferring damage liability, but the cyber insurance market is immature and the understanding and actuarial knowledge of cyber-risk is currently underdeveloped. Because of its adversarial nature and worldwide reach, cyber risk is different from risks in other domains, meaning that a sustainable solution requires new ways of analysing those risks and offering insurance products that provide incentives to improve security within the ecosystem. These innovations can only be achieved by collaboration of mathematicians, computer scientists, economists, behavioural scientists, the insurance and cyber security industry, and policy experts.

This workshop builds upon and reaches beyond the research by the CYBECO project, which brings together perspectives from cybersecurity, risk management, psychology and mathematical modelling. The project itself focuses mainly on choice behaviour, by developing a framework for analysing adversarial risks, identifying insurance selection behaviour, and building a tool for supporting insurance offering and purchase decisions. The broader central question underlying area is under which conditions a healthy cyber insurance market can contribute to the reduction of the impact of cyber threats. We wish to develop this interdisciplinary perspective further by building a new community of individuals, well beyond the scope of the project, who can help us understand the highly complex interplay of social, economic and technical factors that underpin a sustainable model of cyber insurance. To this end, we facilitate talks on key topics as well as workshop discussions on the cyber insurance market, data supply, refined threat modelling and cyber resilience. The integration of perspectives and extended community will provide a basis for new research projects as well as practical impact.