Verisk launches cyber risk modelling and aggregation platform

Verisk, the global data analytics provider, has launched Cyber Risk Navigator, a cyber risk modeling and aggregation platform designed to help re/insurers and brokers understand the financial impact of cyber incidents.

The new software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform features a comprehensive suite of models to estimate potential insured cyber losses for individual incidents and thousands of aggregation scenarios. It includes both systemic and targeted ransomware models and models to help tailor insurance terms specifically suited to cyber.

Cyber Risk Navigator, part of Verisk's Cyber Solutions Suite, allows clients to measure and monitor aggregations of cyber risk within a portfolio and enables risk modeling and data augmentation to manage and develop a custom view of risk. It helps users better understand and adjust risk selection guidelines based on analytics, and develop full stochastic and historical scenario catalogs to facilitate a robust view of tail risk.

It offers flexible financial modeling to support a wide range of affirmative cyber coverages and determine potential losses, with users able to analyse loss breakdowns across diverse event vectors and coverages.

The platform uses proprietary, raw internet sensor data to develop Verisk’s own transparent cyber hygiene scores. It is trained with a gradient boosting machine learning model and calibrated against actual cyber insurance claims. Sensor data reveals not only whether an insured relies upon a service but also quantifies the volume of traffic flowing between the company and that service.

The offering is backed by the Cyber Industry Exposure Database, which includes more than 100 million organisations worldwide, filling in gaps of exposure information using firmographics like revenue and employee count, and business and security data such as cloud service providers. It means users can view losses across their portfolio for any service provider and determine which causes of cloud failure drive these losses.

Scott Stransky, vice president and director of cyber modeling for Verisk, singled out the new targeted ransomware model and the inclusion of a proprietary set of technographic data as among the new platform’s most innovative modeling features.

"Losses from ransomware have driven cyber insurance claims for the past two years,” he noted. “We built a model that captures these events and includes the potential for them to correlate across portfolios.”

Prashant Pai, general manager at Verisk Cyber Solutions, said: "2020 has brought another set of lessons for us in the cyber insurance industry. Cyber risk is growing and intensifying, forcing insurers to reconsider how they manage their cyber portfolios.”

Pai concluded: "Understanding what drives cyber risk is an important start for insurers, but they need tools to make better risk management decisions and stay ahead of the ever-changing threats. We designed Cyber Risk Navigator to enable insurers to confidently grow their portfolios in an ultra-competitive, dynamic market."

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