Contagious malware attacks are the big new cyber threat, and have the scalability to produce a cyber catastrophe, according to risk modelling firm Risk Management Solutions (RMS).
RMS has developed its first probabilistic risk model for cyber-attacks. The firm ran an event in London on Tuesday to discuss its work on quantifying cyber risk.
Cloud outages ranked as the other type of attack most likely to cause a giant tail-risk cyber catastrophe.
That is despite most losses to date being caused by data losses and fraud.
Among risk managers, insurance buyers, and their insurance partners “there’s a lot of demand out there in the market,” said Andrew Coburn, senior vice president at RMS and director of the advisory board for the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Risk Studies.
“Although cyber for us is not one single model,” he said, referring to different methods and causes of losses.
RMS splits cyber into five basic types of attack: data exfiltration; contagious malware; financial theft; cloud outage; and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
Data exfiltration has accounted for just over half of an estimated $2.3bn in cyber insurance claims over the past six…
