It's understandable if the average insurance professional feels like he or she can't do much about cyber risk. The statistics make the issue seem insurmountable.
Almost 70% of U.S. CEOs worry that hacking will hurt their companies' growth, and the FBI notified 3,000 of cyber intrusions in 2013, according to PwC's 2014 U.S. State of Cybercrime Study. But those numbers pre-date two of the largest and most costly attacks in history at Anthem and Sony.
As insurance and risk management educators, we at The Institutes saw what may be the scariest statistic of all this past February—85% of brokers surveyed at an Insurance Times event in London said they were not confident talking to clients about Cyber insurance, and more than a quarter ranked themselves at the lowest degree of confidence. Given the well-documented tendency of people to be overconfident, this is a remarkable indication of a massive Cyber education gap.
Last year, we began our own research into the existing cyber security educational programs to understand how professionals could learn more if they had the ambition.
We found that most materials are too technical for the novice to receive a coherent and comprehensive understanding of best practices. Left without approachable content, most professionals get their information from the news, which is far too general. How can we convey these extremely important cyber issues in a way that risk and insurance professionals can grasp without simultaneously earning a computer science degree?
The result of those efforts is The Institutes' new "Cyber Risk Management" certification course, aimed toward producers, risk managers, underwriters and leaders who want to quickly grasp the fundamentals of cyber security. Professionals will learn broad concepts and also how to confidently discuss technicalities with subject matter experts. Overall, it makes the seemingly monstrous topic much more manageable.
To understand the significance of this opportunity, consider one last statistic from an Insurance Information Institute survey taken at the Property/Casualty Insurance Joint Industry Forum in January: Eighty percent of executives said they see Cyber insurance as a major growth area.
Finally, a bit of cyber optimism.
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