CYBER SECURITY


IBS Journal August 2017


27


Time to log into cyber insurance


Sudeep Nair Senior Director, Cedar Management Consulting International


I


t is now a universal truth that we spend a significant part of our personal and corporate life in the virtual world. Everything from our personal identity, personal relationships


to corporate relationships are up there in cyber space, within easy access for anyone with the required intent and tools.


This also means that traditional notions of risk as a “damage to physical property” has now been replaced by even more dominant threat of damage to our cyber assets and identity. Elections are won or lost, nations are besieged and corporate battles are waged in cyber space.


The information security industry releases appropriate patches and fixes to emerging threats, but often this is done post-facto, after huge damage has already been inflicted on organisations. Malignant agencies and hackers are one step ahead of us in discovering vulnerabilities in the technology portfolio of their prey. This poses a challenge for business leaders to develop a


comprehensive approach to protect the information technology assets against malignant attack.


Every CIO should keep abreast of the latest technology assets deployed in their company and keep an eye out on the risk profile of their information assets. Threats could emerge from data centre infrastructure, people, network, data or system code. However, it is not practical to expect that every company can mitigate all possible risks. Hence, cyber security insurance is emerging as a key financial instrument to provide cover against uncontrollable cyber risk.


Types of cyber risks


Major types of cyber attacks that happen to an organisation can be summarised as follows:


Brute force attack: Software or an algorithm (e.g. robots) which is written to attack a system by searching for vulnerabilities


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