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Businesses are being urged to prepare for a new generation of cyber risks, which are evolving far beyond privacy or reputational issues, according to a new report from Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty (AGCS).
The firm has revealed that the global cyber insurance market is forecast to grow to over $20 billion by 2025. In the UK alone, the cost of cyber crime is estimated to cost $4.3 billion of that.
“As recently as 15 years ago, cyber-attacks were fairly rudimentary and typically the work of hacktivists, but with increasing interconnectivity, globalisation and the commercialisation of cyber-crime there has been an explosion in both frequency and severity of cyber-attacks,” said AGCS CEO Chris Fischer Hirs.
“Cyber insurance is no replacement for robust IT security but it creates a second line of defence to mitigate cyber incidents. AGCS is seeing increasing demand for these services, and we are committed to working with our clients to better understand and respond to growing cyber risk exposures.”
Digital security firm Gemalto has also released some security stats today. The firm revealed that compared to the first half of 2014, data breaches increased by 10 per cent while the number of compromised data records declined by 41 per cent during the first six months of this year.
This decline in compromised records can most likely be attributed to that fact that fewer large-scale mega breaches have occurred in the retail industry compared to the same period last year.
"What we’re continuing to see is a large ROI for hackers with sophisticated attacks that expose massive amounts of data records,” said Jason Hart, VP and CTO for Data Protection at Gemalto.
“Cyber criminals are still getting away with big and very valuable data sets. For instance, the average healthcare data breach in the first half of 2015 netted more than 450,000 data records, which is an increase of 200 per cent compared to the same time last year."
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