Resilience Starts with Ransomware | Resilience
When Resilience decided to enter the insurance market, it was because we saw an opportunity to bring together our team’s unique expertise in the dual pillars of cybersecurity and underwriting to secure organizations against evolving digital threats. Nowhere is this more true than in the face of rising ransomware threats, where we believe our knowledge and data on actual insurance breaches can help customers build a cost effective way to protect their business. We even provide funding for clients to tackle their most pressing cyber risks, thus lowering the likelihood of an insurance claim. At scale, we believe this model will change the economics of not just ransomware, but the security of the internet by making it cheaper and easier for companies to protect themselves, their data, and data at large.
For those who are unaware of the impacts of ransomware, it is a particularly damaging piece of a $3.5 billion cyber fraud industry, that pairs digital kidnapping with the threat of destroying millions of dollars worth of company files, business processes, and even freezing medical operations. It’s made more effective by the fact that it leverages simple mistakes to work effectively, not properly backing up or patching systems. And it is also being fueled by many determined criminals who, as WIRED recently points out, are building quite a successful business around it.
As a cyber insurance company we can not simply stand by and pay claims that only encourage more ransoms, nor can we take options off the table for our insureds whose security is our first priority. As a company we are committing to a three pillar approach
- Help secure our clients with complimentary counter-ransomware tools.
- Secure ourselves and our policies to ensure we are not a vector for attack.
- Change the cybersecurity market to better fight ransomware.
We believe this last piece to be the most critical and is why we have joined the Institute for Security and Technology in founding the Ransomware Task Force. We believe that public-private policy solutions are the only way for us to push back against criminals and those who would give them (and their extorted funds) safe harbor. This type of action isn’t easy but it is necessary. We’re thankful to have found reputable partners not only in IST but also in our fellow taskforce partners Microsoft, the Cyber Threat Alliance, the Shadowserver Foundation, UT Austin, and others.
As noted above, there are a number of disturbing statistics that show ransomware is a profitable business model — and growing. But the real problem with ransomware isn’t just the year-over-year boom. In fact, this is the first time a threat has presented itself on the internet that has the potential to destroy the economics that support our global internet and drive us down a dark path of closed and heavily militarized silos. Without individuals, organizations, and cybersecurity and insurance firms working in concert against these threats, they will only grow.
We hope you will join us — the only way to defeat the growing threat of ransomware is through education and vigilance!
Originally published at https://www.resilienceinsurance.com.
