Last month, another underwriting firm launched a cyber protection offering. Sydney-headquartered Mustard Underwriting announced cyber coverage through a partnership with Digimune, a cloud-based cybersecurity services provider. A Mustard statement on LinkedIn described the offering as an “all-in-one platform” to comprehensively protect individuals and families from cyber risks.
“Our offering is unique,” said CEO Stuart Byars (pictured above) to Insurance Business. “We are initially targeting the consumer but will provide SME solutions in our next release.”
Byars said their protection includes the “pre-emptive capability” of monitoring and restitution support and also the financial recompense of insurance coverage.
The Mustard boss suggested that a recent personal experience with a cyberattack reinforced his confidence that the market needs a product like the one he is offering.
“I have recently had personal experience with this, my two sons having both lost money through cybercrime,” said Byars. “We were oblivious as to who to turn to and what to do.”
He said his firm’s cyber offering “could’ve helped navigate this situation, helped addressed the problem and given them [his sons] a better opportunity to get their money back.”
Underwriting firms are among the leaders in the industry when it comes to offering new cyber insurance offerings.
Also last month, another Sydney-based agency, Hutch Underwriting, released an insurance offering for residential and commercial builders that included a level of cyber coverage.
Byars agrees: cybercrimes are threatening target customers.
“This threat plays out in our [Mustard’s] rapidly growing target industry, the sharing economy,” said Byars. “With more people transacting online, accelerated by COVID-19, so does the threat of cyberattack as consumers are transacting more frequently and sharing more of their personal details online.”
He said large corporates, despite having large cyber teams, can still be vulnerable.
“SMEs and consumers need help,” said Byars.
Many experts say that the cyber threat is growing. Some identify Australia as a country with a particularly acute cyber problem.
“Current statistics from the ACSC [Australian Cyber Security Centre] show that there’s a cyber incident once every seven minutes in Australia,” said Jonathan Jackson, director of engineering for BlackBerry APJ in a recent interview with Insurance Business. “At BlackBerry, we are seeing and stopping an attack every single minute across our customer base.”
Blackberry was involved in cyber research conducted by the Australian National University (ANU). The research was used to encourage the Quad group of nations – Australia, the United States, India and Japan – “to break the business model of ransomware criminal groups” by adopting its recommendations.
“Combatting Ransomware” had seven cyber policy recommendations for the Quad. The report’s authors and stakeholders said the insurance industry has an important leadership role to play.
“We believe that the insurance industry can play a leadership role in our ability to be able to prevent these attacks from happening,” said Jackson. “It’s not necessarily just about incident response but about being able to provide a holistic approach as to how companies can be more cyber resilient.”
Jackson said one focus of the cyber policy recommendations is incentivising the insurance industry to build better resilience for organisations.
“Cyber threat is growing massively in our country and around the world,” said Byars. “With high profile cases like Optus and Medibank to name a few, the threat is real.”
Earlier this month, another major Australian company was the victim of a cyberattack.
Ventia describes itself as one of the largest essential services providers in Australia and New Zealand. According to its website, the firm maintains and manages the operation of “critical public and private assets and infrastructure” across industries including defense, energy, education and health. The firm’s website says its workforce of more than 35,000 people operate at over 400 sites across Australia.
The firm provided few details about the cyberattack but confirmed in a statement that some systems were impacted.
In an update the company said it was “confident that the cyber incident has been contained.” The statement said key internal systems have been re-enabled and “additional key external-facing networks are being progressively restored in line with our assurance process.”
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