16 June 2014 Insurance

Cyber risk: a growing problem

The hot topic of cyber risk and security as viewed by a leading expert in the field will be the focus of the opening keynote speech at this year’s AIRMIC conference in Birmingham, which starts this afternoon (Monday June 16).

Dr Simon Moores, managing director of Zentelligence, a vice chairman of the Conservative Technology Forum and programme director and chair of the International eCrime Congress, will be emphasising the desperate state of internet security today.

“The state of information security as I see it today is pretty abysmal,” he said. “The nature of the threat itself has changed quite dramatically from the old days when it was mostly carried out by kids. Hacking was a more elaborate version of spraying graffiti on somebody’s fence - but you could do it on millions of fences and really inconvenience people and bring down email systems.”

He said that a shift occurred when organised crime started to get involved as the world started to perceive the monetary value of information data records and financial records.

“Organised crime started to invest very heavily in creating exploits for stealing information from the internet,” he said. “At the same time the nature of the programs themselves had evolved from a point where you had to be an expert to use them to a point where you can now buy them off the shelf online. You can pick from a menu of different exploits – do you want it to vandalise, to steal, to take over people’s machines or take on blended threats, which is a mix of all those things?

“You can even rent it – and many of these companies provide after service as well. It’s all incredibly organised.”

Moores will be using his speech to give a detailed overview of the current state of play, taking in everything from the way in which automated systems can now spawn thousands of new viruses daily to the struggle faced by everyone from governments to the creators of anti-virus software in trying to keep pace with the constant barrage of new dangers.

He warns that one of the biggest dangers in the current environment is complacency.

“In a world that is so much focused on reputational management you need to assume that if eBay cannot defend itself adequately against the threat and if Adobe can’t defend itself from losing its data then can you, as a CEO, can probably not defend your company from a concerted attack from people that want to steal your information.”

He anticipates that the insurance industry will struggle to insure such rapidly evolving risks.

“We know for a fact that companies like eBay and Adobe and many of the largest banks like Barclays have been taking precautions and they haven’t done them very much good because they’d still been exploited in one way or another.

“For insurance companies this is a very difficult place to be because they’re trying to insure something which demonstrably is becoming uninsurable. Insurance companies are probably going to increasingly look at their policies and question what level of insurance they should be offering.”

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