A recent poll from Reinsurance News suggests that AI-powered threats will drive the biggest losses across the cyber re/insurance market over the next two years.
Hundreds of people from across the insurance and reinsurance industry responded to the poll.
Of this, nearly half of respondents (45%) said that they expect AI-powered threats to be the biggest driver of losses over the next two years.
This should not come as too much of a surprise, given the widespread adoption of AI technology across the sector in recent years.
Earlier this year, Swiss Re and Zurich examined the risks that Generative AI (GenAI) – a type of AI that can produce various types of content such as text, imagery and audio – poses for the re/insurance sector.
Some of the biggest threats that were highlighted included deep fakes, false positives, and false negatives.
In addition, a report released earlier this year from Lloyd’s, the world’s oldest insurance and reinsurance marketplace, explored how the rapid evolution of GenAI is reshaping the cyber landscape, ultimately requiring businesses to bolster their resilience to ever-changing threats.
Meanwhile, ransomware, another major cyber threat that is often making headwinds across the industry, received a significant amount of votes too on the poll, coming in second place with 30%.
Ransomware is often featured on our pages. For example, in May, data from At-Bay revealed that the frequency of ransomware claims in the United States between 2022-2023 jumped by a staggering 64% year over year,.
Another alarming statistic, Corvus Insurance revealed that Q1 2024 set a record for the most global ransomware attacks in a first quarter, with data revealing that 1,075 leak site ransomware victims were posted on leak sites during the first quarter of 2024.
Interestingly, both cloud-related threats and business email compromise (BEC) received similar responses, coming in at 15% and 10%, respectively.
Guy Carpenter, the global risk and reinsurance specialist and business of Marsh McLennan, recently stated that organisations must do better to understand the complexity of BEC threats.
The firm warned that BEC is not a new threat vector, and that like many cyberattack vectors, it is gaining in popularity due to its relatively low technical lift, making it highly effective and lucrative from the threat actors’ perspective.
