AIR Worldwide Releases Cyber Risk Application
ARC (Analytics of Risk from Cyber) provides underwriters and risk managers with a variety of cyber analytics
BOSTON, April 24, 2017 — Catastrophe modeling firm AIR Worldwide today released ARC (Analytics of Risk from Cyber), a comprehensive cyber risk modeling application for the insurance and reinsurance markets. ARC can evaluate any commercial policy (including those vulnerable to silent cyber), measure and monitor aggregations of cyber risk within a portfolio, and estimate potential insured cyber losses for portfolios. AIR Worldwide is a Verisk Analytics (Nasdaq:VRSK) business.
“Insurers typically have very little information about the cyber risk characteristics of the companies they insure and instead rely on a crude market-share approach,” said Scott Stransky, assistant vice president and principal scientist, AIR Worldwide. “ARC takes advantage of the detailed information that AIR has compiled on companies to help insurers identify their sources of aggregation risk and to determine with greater certainty which of their insureds would be affected by various aggregation scenarios.”
ARC makes use of a proprietary database of industry exposures that users can leverage to enhance their view of the risk. AIR has combined data from multiple commercial and public sources to develop a comprehensive view of the insurable cyber market in the United States and key companies around the world. AIR’s detailed industry exposures contain information about a company’s demographic, information technology, and cybersecurity profile as outlined by the Verisk Cyber Exposure Data Standard. For millions of organizations, AIR has data on risk attributes such as company industry and size, data storage and transfer mechanisms, and cloud and domain name service providers, among many other pieces of information.
“Understanding an insured’s virtual supply chain is a critical first step toward managing systemic cyber risk within a portfolio,” said Laila Khudairi, underwriter, Tokio Marine Kiln. “A global database of exposures such as the one underlying ARC gives us more confidence that the modeled loss estimates reflect the risk within our portfolio.”
To estimate expected losses from cyber incidents, AIR employs a ground-up methodology that first considers an organization’s risk profile as the basis for determining the magnitude and cause of loss. Users have the flexibility to determine how each cause of loss, such as security breach expense or business interruption, is best represented within the insurer’s unique policy coverage framework. Any commercial policy can be evaluated by the AIR cyber application, including:
- stand-alone cyber — policies that affirmatively cover damages resulting from cybersecurity incidents
- cyber endorsements — supplemental cyber coverage added to existing commercial policies, such as directors and officers and errors and omissions coverage, general liability, or property
- silent cyber — any policy that doesn’t explicitly include or exclude cyber
As part of the new cyber application, AIR offers a variety of cyber scenarios that can be used to estimate the financial impact of a defined event on an individual company or portfolio. Such scenarios include cloud service provider downtime, accidental data breach, and blackout events for regions in the United States and the United Kingdom. Included with these scenarios is the ability to modify severity parameters, risk managers can implement their own view of the risk, test the sensitivity of portfolios to different event circumstances, and explore the impact of adjusting cyber policy terms.
A cyber risk consulting practice is also available to help clients augment the cyber exposure information in their existing books of business and to produce custom reports on aggregation risk and the probability of breach.
About AIR Worldwide
AIR Worldwide (AIR) provides catastrophe risk modeling solutions that make individuals, businesses, and society more resilient. AIR founded the catastrophe modeling industry in 1987 and today models the risk from natural catastrophes, terrorism, cyber attacks, and pandemics globally. Insurance, reinsurance, financial, corporate, and government clients rely on AIR’s advanced science, software, and consulting services for catastrophe risk management, insurance-linked securities, site-specific engineering analyses, and agricultural risk management. AIR Worldwide, a Verisk Analytics (Nasdaq:VRSK) business, is headquartered in Boston with additional offices in North America, Europe, and Asia. For more information, please visit www.air-worldwide.com.
SOURCE: Verisk Analytics