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NIGEL ALLENMay 05, 2020
This changes everything
This changes everything
This Changes Everything
May 05, 2020

At Exceedance 2020, RMS explored the key forces currently disrupting the industry, from technology, data analytics and the cloud through to rising extremes of catastrophic events like the pandemic and climate change. This coupling of technological and environmental disruption represents a true inflection point for the industry. EXPOSURE asked six experts across RMS for their views on why they believe these forces will change everything Cloud Computing: Moe Khosravy, Executive Vice President, Software and Platforms How are you seeing businesses transition their workloads over to the cloud? I have to say it’s been remarkable. We’re way past basic conversations on the value proposition of the cloud to now having deep technical discussions that are truly transformative plays. Customers are looking for solutions that seamlessly scale with their business and platforms that lower their cost of ownership while delivering capabilities that can be consumed from anywhere in the world. Why is the cloud so important or relevant now? It is now hard for a business to beat the benefits that the cloud offers and getting harder to justify buying and supporting complex in-house IT infrastructure. There is also a mindset shift going on — why is an in-house IT team responsible for running and supporting another vendor’s software on their systems if the vendor itself can provide that solution? This burden can now be lifted using the cloud, letting the business concentrate on what it does best. Has the pandemic affected views of being in the cloud? I would say absolutely. We have always emphasized the importance of cloud and true SaaS architectures to enable business continuity — allowing you to do your work from anywhere, decoupled from your IT and physical footprint. Never has the importance of this been more clearly underlined than during the past few months. Risk Analytics: Cihan Biyikoglu, Executive Vice President, Product What are the specific industry challenges that risk analytics is solving or has the potential to solve? Risk analytics really is a wide field, but in the immediate short term one of the focus areas for us is improving productivity around data. So much time is spent by businesses trying to manually process data — cleansing, completing and correcting data — and on conversion between incompatible datasets. This alone is a huge barrier just to get a single set of results. If we can take this burden away, give decision-makers the power to get results in real time with automated and efficient data handling, then with that I believe we will liberate them to use the latest insights to drive business results. Another important innovation here are the HD Models™. The power of the new engine with its improved accuracy I believe is a game changer that will give our customers a competitive edge. How will risk analytics impact activities and capabilities within the market? As seen in other industries, the more data you can combine, the better the analytics become — that’s the universal law of analytics. Getting all of this data on a unified platform and combining different datasets unearths new insights, which could produce opportunities to serve customers better and drive profit or growth. What are the longer-term implications for risk analytics? In my view, it’s about generating more effective risk insights from analytics, results in better decision- making and the ability to explore new product areas with more confidence. It will spark a wave of innovation to profitably serve customers with exciting products and understand the risk and cost drivers more clearly. How is RMS capitalizing on risk analytics? At RMS, we have the pieces in place for clients to accelerate their risk analytics with the unified, open platform, Risk Intelligence™, which is built on a Risk Data Lake™ in the cloud and is ready to take all sources of data and unearth new insights. Applications such as Risk Modeler™ and ExposureIQ™ can quickly get decision-makers to the analytics they need to influence their business. Open Standards: Dr. Paul Reed, Technical Program Manager, RDOS Why are open standards so important and relevant now? I think the challenges of risk data interoperability and supporting new lines of business have been recognized for many years, as companies have been forced to rework existing data standards to try to accommodate emerging risks and to squeeze more data into proprietary standards that can trace their origins to the 1990s. Today, however, with the availability of big data technology, cloud platforms such as RMS Risk Intelligence and standards such as the Risk Data Open Standard™ (RDOS) allow support for high-resolution risk modeling, new classes of risk, complex contract structures and simplified data exchange. Are there specific industry challenges that open standards are solving or have the potential to solve? I would say that open standards such as the RDOS are helping to solve risk data interoperability challenges, which have been hindering the industry, and provide support for new lines of business. In the case of the RDOS, it’s specifically designed for extensibility, to create a risk data exchange standard that is future-proof and can be readily modified and adapted to meet both current and future requirements. Open standards in other industries, such as Kubernetes, Hadoop and HTML, have proven to be catalysts for collaborative innovation, enabling accelerated development of new capabilities. How is RMS responding to and capitalizing on this development? RMS contributed the RDOS to the industry, and we are using it as the data framework for our platform called Risk Intelligence. The RDOS is free for anyone to use, and anyone can contribute updates that can expand the value and utility of the standard — so its development and direction is not dependent on a single vendor. We’ve put in place an independent steering committee to guide the development of the standard, currently made up of 15 companies. It provides benefits to RMS clients not only by enhancing the new RMS platform and applications, but also by enabling other industry users who create new and innovative products and address new and emerging risk classes. Pandemic Risk: Dr. Gordon Woo, Catastrophist How does pandemic risk affect the market? There’s no doubt that the current pandemic represents a globally systemic risk across many market sectors, and insurers are working out both what the impact from claims will be and the impact on capital. For very good reasons, people are categorizing the COVID-19 disease as a game-changer. However, in my view, SARS [severe acute respiratory syndrome] in 2003, MERS [Middle East respiratory syndrome] in 2012 and Ebola in 2014 should also have been game-changers. Over the last decade alone, we have seen multiple near misses. It’s likely that suppression strategies to combat the coronavirus will probably continue in some form until a vaccine is developed, and governments must strike this uneasy balance between their economies and the opening of their populations to exposure from the virus. What are the longer-term implications of this current pandemic for the industry? It’s clear that the mitigation of pandemic risk will need to be prioritized and given far more urgency than before. There’s no doubt in my mind that events such as the 2014 Ebola crisis were a missed opportunity for new initiatives in pandemic risk mitigation. Away from the life and health sector, all insurers will need to have a better grasp on future pandemics, after seeing the impact of COVID-19 and its wide business impact. The market could look to bold initiatives with governments to examine how to cover future pandemics, similar to how terror attacks are covered as a pooled risk. How is RMS helping its clients in relation to COVID-19? Since early January when the first cases emerged from Wuhan, China, we’ve been supporting our clients and the wider market in gaining a better understanding of the diverse loss implications of COVID-19. Our LifeRisks® team has been actively assisting in pandemic risk management, with regular communications and briefings, and will incorporate new perspectives from COVID-19 into our infectious diseases modeling. Climate Change: Ryan Ogaard, Senior Vice President, Model Product Management Why is climate change so relevant to the market now? There are many reasons. Insurers and their stakeholders are looking at the constant flow of catastrophes, from the U.S. hurricane season of 2017, wildfires in California and bushfires in Australia, to recent major typhoons and wondering if climate change is driving extreme weather risk, and what it could do in the future. They’re asking whether the current extent of climate change risk is priced into their premiums. Regulators are also beginning to conduct stress tests on the potential impact of climate change in the future, and insurers must respond. How will climate change impact how the market operates? Similar to any risk, insurers need to understand and quantify how the physical risk of climate change will impact their portfolios and adjust their strategy accordingly. Also, over the coming years it appears likely that regulators will incorporate climate change reporting into their regimes. Once an insurer understands their exposure to climate change risk, they can then start to take action — which will impact how the market operates. These actions could be in the form of premium changes, mitigating actions such as supporting physical defenses, diversifying the risk or taking on more capital. How is RMS responding to market needs around climate change? RMS is listening to the needs of clients to understand their pain points around climate change risk, what actions they are taking and how we can add value. We’re working with a number of clients on bespoke studies that modify the current view of risk to project into the future and/or test the sensitivity of current modeling assumptions. We’re also working to help clients understand the extent to which climate change is already built into risk models, to educate clients on emerging climate change science and to explain whether there is or isn’t a clear climate change signal for a particular peril. Cyber: Dr. Christos Mitas, Vice President, Model Development How is this change currently manifesting itself? While cyber risk itself is not new, for anyone involved in protecting or insuring organizations against cyberattacks, they will know that the nature of cyber risk is forever evolving. This could involve changes in those perpetrating the attacks, from lone wolf criminals to state-backed actors or the type of target from an unpatched personal computer to a power-plant control system. If you take the current COVID-19 pandemic, this has seen cybercriminals look to take advantage of millions of employees working from home or vulnerable business IT infrastructure. Change to the threat landscape is a constant for cyber risk. Why is cyber risk so important and relevant right now? Simply because new cyber risks emerge, and insurers who are active in this area need to ensure they are ahead of the curve in terms of awareness and have the tools and knowledge to manage new risks. There have been systemic ransomware attacks over the last few years, and criminals continue to look for potential weaknesses in networked systems, third-party software, supply chains — all requiring constant vigilance. It’s this continual threat of a systemic attack that requires insurers to use effective tools based on cutting-edge science, to capture the latest threats and identify potential risk aggregation. How is RMS responding to market needs around cyber risk? With our latest RMS Cyber Solutions, which is version 4.0, we’ve worked closely with clients and the market to really understand the pain points within their businesses, with a wealth of new data assets and modeling approaches. One area is the ability to know the potential cyber risk of the type of business you are looking to insure. In version 4.0, we have a database of over 13 million businesses that can help enrich the information you have about your portfolio and prospective clients, which then leads to more prudent and effective risk modeling. A Time to Change Our industry is undergoing a period of significant disruption on multiple fronts. From the rapidly evolving exposure landscape and the extraordinary changes brought about by the pandemic to step-change advances in technology and seismic shifts in data analytics capabilities, the market is undergoing an unparalleled transition period. As Exceedance 2020 demonstrated, this is no longer a time for business as usual. This is what defines leaders and culls the rest. This changes everything.

Helen YatesMay 20, 2019
The future of risk management
The future of risk management
The Future of Risk Management
May 20, 2019

(Re)insuring new and emerging risks requires data and, ideally, a historical loss record upon which to manage an exposure. But what does the future of risk management look like when so many of these exposures are intangible or unexpected?  Sudden and dramatic breakdowns become more likely in a highly interconnected and increasingly polarized world, warns the “Global Risks Report 2019” from the World Economic Forum (WEF). “Firms should focus as much on risk response as on risk mitigation,” advises John Drzik, president of global risk and digital at Marsh, one of the report sponsors. “There’s an inevitability to having a certain number of shock events, and firms should focus on how to respond to fast-moving events with a high degree of uncertainty.” Macrotrends such as climate change, urbanization and digitization are all combining in a way that makes major claims more impactful when things go wrong. But are all low-probability/high-consequence events truly beyond our ability to identify and manage? Dr. Gordon Woo, catastrophist at RMS, believes that in an age of big data and advanced analytics, information is available that can help corporates, insurers and reinsurers to understand the plethora of new and emerging risks they face. “The sources of emerging risk insight are out there,” says Woo. “The challenge is understanding the significance of the information available and ensuring it is used to inform decision-makers.” However, it is not always possible to gain access to the insight needed. “Some of the near-miss data regarding new software and designs may be available online,” says Woo. “For example, with the Boeing 737 Max 8, there were postings by pilots where control problems were discussed prior to the Lion Air disaster of October 2018. Equally, intelligence information on terrorist plots may be available from online terrorist chatter. But typically, it is much harder for individuals to access this information, other than security agencies. “Peter Drucker [consultant and author] was right when he said: ‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it,’” he adds. “And this is the issue for (re)insurers when it comes to emerging risks. There is currently not a lot of standardization between risk compliance systems and the way the information is gathered, and corporations are still very reluctant to give information away to insurers.” The Intangibles Protection Gap While traditional physical risks, such as fire and flood, are well understood, well modeled and widely insured, new and emerging risks facing businesses and communities are increasingly intangible and risk transfer solutions are less widely available. While there is an important upside to many technological innovations, for example, there are also downsides that are not yet fully understood or even recognized, thinks Robert Muir-Wood, chief research officer of science and technology at RMS. “Last year’s Typhoon Jebi caused coastal flooding in the Kansai region of Japan,” he says. “There were a lot of cars on the quayside close to where the storm made landfall and many of these just caught on fire. It burnt out a large number of cars that were heading for export. “The reason for the fires was the improved capability of batteries in cars,” he explains. “And when these batteries are immersed in water they burst into flames. So, with this technology you’ve created a whole new peril. There is currently not a lot of standardization between risk compliance systems and the way the information is gathered Gordon Woo RMS “As new technology emerges, new risks emerge,” he concludes. “And it’s not as though the old risks go away. They sort of morph and they always will. Clearly the more that software becomes a critical part of how things function, then there is more of an opportunity for things to go wrong.” From nonphysical-damage business interruption and reputational harm to the theft of intellectual property and a cyber data breach, the ability for underwriters to get a handle on these risks and potential losses is one of the industry’s biggest modern-day challenges. The dearth of products and services for esoteric commercial risks is known as the “intangibles protection gap,” explains Muir-Wood. “There is this question within the whole span of risk management of organizations — of which an increasing amount is intangible — whether they will be able to buy insurance for those elements of their risk that they feel they do not have control over.” While the (re)insurance industry is responding with new products and services geared toward emerging risks, such as cyber, there are some organizational perils, such as reputational risk, that are best addressed by instilling the right risk management culture and setting the tone from the top within organizations, thinks Wayne Ratcliffe, head of risk management at SCOR. “Enterprise risk management is about taking a holistic view of the company and having multidisciplinary teams brainstorming together,” he says. “It’s a tendency of human nature to work in silos in which everyone has their own domain to protect and to work on, but working across an organization is the only way to carry out proper risk management. “There are many causes and consequences of reputational risk, for instance,” he continues. “When I think of past examples where things have gone horribly wrong — and there are so many of them, from Deepwater Horizon to Enron — in certain cases there were questionable ethics and a failure in risk management culture. Companies have to set the tone at the top and then ensure it has spread across the whole organization. This requires constant checking and vigilance.” The best way of checking that risk management procedures are being adhered to is by being really close to the ground, thinks Ratcliffe. “We’re moving too far into a world of emails and communication by Skype. What people need to be doing is talking to each other in person and cross-checking facts. Human contact is essential to understanding the risk.” Spotting the Next “Black Swan” What of future black swans? As per Donald Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns,” so called black swan events are typically those that come from left field. They take everyone by surprise (although are often explained away in hindsight) and have an impact that cascades through economic, political and social systems in ways that were previously unimagined, with severe and widespread consequences. “As (re)insurers we can look at past data, but you have to be aware of the trends and forces at play,” thinks Ratcliffe. “You have to be aware of the source of the risk. In ‘The Big Short’ by Michael Lewis, the only person who really understood the impending subprime collapse was the one who went house-to-house asking people if they were having trouble paying their mortgages, which they were. New technologies are creating more opportunities but they’re also making society more vulnerable to sophisticated cyberattacks Wayne Ratcliffe SCOR “Sometimes you need to go out of the bounds of data analytics into a more intuition-based way of picking up signals where there is no data,” he continues. “You need imagination and to come up with scenarios that can happen based on a group of experts talking together and debating how exposures can connect and interconnect. “It’s a little dangerous to base everything on big data measurement and statistics, and at SCOR we talk about the ‘art and science of risk,’” he continues. “And science is more than statistics. We often need hard science behind what we are measuring. A single-point estimate of the measure is not sufficient. We also need confidence intervals corresponding to a range of probabilities.” In its “Global Risks Report 2019,” the WEF examines a series of “what-if” future shocks and asks if its scenarios, while not predictions, are at least “a reminder of the need to think creatively about risk and to expect the unexpected?” The WEF believes future shocks could come about as a result of advances in technology, the depletion of global resources and other major macrotrends clashing in new and extreme ways. “The world is becoming hyperconnected,” says Ratcliffe. “People are becoming more dependent on social media, which is even shaping political decisions, and organizations are increasingly connected via technology and the internet of things. New technologies are creating more opportunities but they’re also making society more vulnerable to sophisticated cyberattacks. We have to think about the systemic nature of it all.” As governments are pressured to manage the effects of climate change, for instance, will the use of weather manipulation tools — such as cloud seeding to induce or suppress rainfall — result in geopolitical conflict? Could biometrics and AI that recognize and respond to emotions be used to further polarize and/or control society? And will quantum computing render digital cryptography obsolete, leaving sensitive data exposed? The risk of cyberattack was the No. 1 risk identified by business leaders in virtually all advanced economies in the WEF’s “Global Risks Report 2019,” with concern about both data breach and direct attacks on company infrastructure causing business interruption. The report found that cyberattacks continue to pose a risk to critical infrastructure, noting the attack in July 2018 that compromised many U.S. power suppliers. In the attack, state-backed Russian hackers gained remote access to utility- company control rooms in order to carry out reconnaissance. However, in a more extreme scenario the attackers were in a position to trigger widespread blackouts across the U.S., according to the Department of Homeland Security. Woo points to a cyberattack that impacted Norsk Hydro, the company that was responsible for a massive bauxite spill at an aluminum plant in Brazil last year, with a targeted strain of ransomware known as “LockerGoga.” With an apparent motivation to wreak revenge for the environmental damage caused, hackers gained access to the company’s IT infrastructure, including the control systems at its aluminum smelting plants. He thinks a similar type of attack by state-sponsored actors could cause significantly greater disruption if the attackers’ motivation was simply to cause damage to industrial control systems. Woo thinks cyber risk has significant potential to cause a major global shock due to the interconnected nature of global IT systems. “WannaCry was probably the closest we’ve come to a cyber 911,” he explains. “If the malware had been released earlier, say January 2017 before the vulnerability was patched, losses would have been a magnitude higher as the malware would have spread like measles as there was no herd immunity. The release of a really dangerous cyber weapon with the right timing could be extremely powerful.”

Helen YatesMarch 17, 2017
botnet
botnet
The Day a Botnet Took Down the Internet
March 17, 2017

The Dyn distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in October 2016 highlighted security flaws inherent in the Internet of Things (IoT). EXPOSURE asks what this means for businesses and insurers as the world becomes increasingly connected. A decade ago, Internet connections were largely limited to desktop computers, laptops, tablets, and smart phones. Since then there has been an explosion of devices with IP addresses, including baby monitors, connected home appliances, motor vehicles, security cameras, webcams, ‘Fitbits’ and other wearables. Gartner predicts there will be 20.8 billion things connected to the Internet by 2020. In a hyper-connected world, governments, corporates, insurers and banks need to better understand the potential for systemic and catastrophic risk arising from a cyber attack seeking to exploit IoT vulnerabilities. With few actual examples of how such attacks could play out, realistic disaster scenarios and cyber modeling are essential tools by which (re)insurers can manage their aggregate exposures and stress test their portfolios. “IF MALICIOUS ACTORS WANTED TO, THEY WOULD ATTACK CORE SERVICES ON THE INTERNET AND I THINK WE’D BE SEEING A NEAR GLOBAL OUTAGE” KEN MUNRO PEN TEST PARTNERS Many IoT devices currently on the market were not designed with strict IT security in mind. Ethical hackers have demonstrated how everything from cars to children’s toys can be compromised. These connected devices are often an organization’s weakest link. The cyber criminals responsible for the 2013 Target data breach are understood to have gained access to the retailer’s systems and the credit card details of over 40 million customers via the organization’s heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system. The assault on DNS hosting firm Dyn in October 2016, which brought down multiple websites including Twitter, Netflix, Amazon, Spotify, Reddit, and CNN in Europe and the U.S., was another wake-up call. The DDoS attack was perpetrated using the Mirai virus to compromise IoT systems. Like a parasite, the malware gained control of an estimated 100,000 devices, using them to bombard and overwhelm Dyn’s infrastructure. This is just the tip of the iceberg, according to Ken Munro, partner, Pen Test Partners. “My first thought [following the Dyn attack] was ‘you ain’t seen nothing yet’. That particular incident was probably using the top end of a terabyte of data per second, and that’s nothing. We’ve already seen a botnet that is several orders of magnitude larger than that. If malicious actors wanted to, they would attack core services on the Internet and I think we’d be seeing a near global outage.” In the rush to bring new IoT devices to market, IT security has been somewhat of an afterthought, thinks Munro. The situation is starting to change, though, with consumer watchdogs in Norway, the Netherlands and the U.S. taking action. However, there is a significant legacy problem to overcome and it will be several years before current security weaknesses are tackled in a meaningful way. “I’ve still got our first baby monitor from 10 years ago,” he points out. “The Mirai botnet should have been impossible, but it wasn’t because a whole bunch of security camera manufacturers did a really cheap job. IT security wasn’t on their radar. They were thinking about keeping people’s homes secure without even considering that the device itself might actually be the problem.” In attempting to understand the future impact of such attacks, it is important to gain a better understanding of motivation. For cyber criminals, DDoS attacks using IoT botnets could be linked to extortion attempts or to diverting the attention of IT professionals away from other activities. For state-sponsored actors, the purpose could be more sinister, with the intent to cause widespread disruption, and potentially physical damage and bodily harm. Insurers Stress-Test “Silent” Cyber It is the latter scenario that is of growing concern to risk and insurance managers. Lloyd’s, for instance, has asked syndicates to create at least three internal “plausible but extreme” cyber attack scenarios as stress-tests for cyber catastrophe losses. It has asked them to calculate their total gross aggregate exposure to each scenario across all classes, including “silent” cyber. AIG is also considering how a major cyber attack could impact its book of business. “We are looking at it, not only from our own ERM perspective, but also to understand what probable maximum losses there could be as we start to introduce other products and are able to attach cyber to traditional property and casualty policies,” explains Mark Camillo, head of cyber at AIG. “We look at different types of scenarios and how they would impact a book.” AIG and a number of Lloyd’s insurers have expanded their cyber offerings to include cover for non-damage business interruption and physical damage and bodily harm arising from a cyber incident. Some carriers – including FM Global – are explicitly including cyber in their traditional suite of products. Others have yet to include explicit wording on how traditional products would respond to a cyber incident. “WE HAVE RELEASED A NUMBER OF CYBER-PHYSICAL ATTACK SCENARIOS THAT CAUSE LOSSES TO TRADITIONAL PROPERTY INSURANCE” ANDREW COBURN RMS “I don’t know if the market will move towards exclusions or including affirmative cyber coverage within property and casualty to give insureds a choice as to how they want to purchase it,” states Camillo. “What will change is that there is going to have to be some sort of due diligence to ensure cyber exposures are coded properly and carriers are taking that into consideration in capital requirements for these types of attacks.” In addition to markets such as Lloyd’s, there is growing scrutiny from insurance industry regulators, including the Prudential Regulation Authority in the U.K., on how a major cyber event could impact the insurance industry and its capital buffers. They are putting pressure on those carriers that are currently silent on how their traditional products would respond, to make it clear whether cyber-triggered events would be covered under conventional policies. “The reinsurance market is certainly concerned about, and constantly looking at the potential for, catastrophic events that could happen across a portfolio,” says William Henriques, senior managing director and co-head of the Cyber Practice Group at Aon Benfield. “That has not stopped them from writing cyber reinsurance and there’s enough capacity out there. But as the market grows and gets to US$10 billion, and reinsurers keep supporting that growth, they are going to be watching that accumulation and potential for catastrophic risk and managing that.” Catastrophic Cyber Scenarios In December 2015 and again in December 2016, parts of Ukraine’s power grid were taken down. WIRED magazine noted that many parts of the U.S. grid were less secure than Ukraine’s and would take longer to reboot. It was eerily similar to a fictitious scenario published by Cambridge University’s Centre for Risk Studies in partnership with Lloyd’s in 2015. ‘Business Blackout’ considered the impact of a cyber attack on the US power grid, estimating total economic impact from the 1-in-200 scenario would be US$243 billion, rising to US$1 trillion in its most extreme form. It is not beyond the realms of possibility for a Mirai-style virus targeting smart thermostats to be used to achieve such a blackout, thinks Pen Test Partners’ Ken Munro. “You could simultaneously turn them all on and off at the same time and create huge power spikes on the electricity grid. If you turn it on and off and on again quickly, you’ll knock out the grid – then we would see some really serious consequences.” Smart thermostats could be compromised in other ways, for instance by targeting food and pharmaceutical facilities with the aim to spoil goods. There is a commonly held belief that the industrial and supervisory control and data acquisition systems (ICS/SCADA) used by energy and utility companies are immune to cyber attacks because they are disconnected from the Internet, a protective measure known as “air gapping”. Smart thermostats and other connected devices could render that defense obsolete. In its Cyber Accumulation Management System (CAMS v2.0), RMS considered how silent cyber exposures could impact accumulation risk in the event of major cyber attacks on operations technology, using the Ukrainian power grid attack as an example. “We’ve released a number of cyber-physical attack scenarios that cause losses to traditional property insurance,” explains Andrew Coburn, senior vice president at RMS and a founder and member of the executive team of the Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies. “We’re working with our clients on trying to figure out what level of stress test should be running,” he explains. “The CAMS system we’ve released is about running large numbers of scenarios and we have extended that to look at silent cover, things in conventional insurance policies that could potentially be triggered by a cyber attack, such as fires and explosions.” Multiple lines of business could be impacted by a cyber event thinks Coburn, including nearly all property classes, including aviation and aerospace. “We have included some scenarios for marine and cargo insurance, offshore energy lines of business, industrial property, large numbers of general liability and professional lines, and, quite importantly, financial institutions professional indemnity, D&O and specialty lines.” “The IoT is a key element of the systemic potential of cyber attacks,” he says. “Most of the systemic risk is about looking at your tail risk. Insurers need to look at how much capital they need to support each line of business, how much reinsurance they need to buy and how they structure their risk capital.” RMS CAMS v2.0 Scenarios Cyber-Induced Fires in Commercial Office Buildings Hackers exploit vulnerabilities in the smart battery management system of a common brand of laptop, sending their lithium-ion batteries into thermal runaway state. The attack is coordinated to occur on one night. A small proportion of infected laptops that are left on charge overnight overheat and catch fire, and some unattended fires in commercial office buildings spread to cause major losses. Insurers face claims for a large numbers of fires in their commercial property and homeowners’ portfolios. Cyber-Enabled Marine Cargo Theft From Port Cyber criminals gain access to a port management system in use at several major ports. They identify high value cargo shipments and systematically switch and steal containers passing through the ports over many months. When the process of theft is finally discovered, the hackers scramble the data in the system, disabling the ports from operating for several days. Insurers face claims for cargo loss and business interruption in their marine lines. ICS-Triggered Fires in Industrial Processing Plants External saboteurs gain access to the process control network of large processing plants, and spoof the thermostats of the industrial control systems (ICS), causing heat-sensitive processes to overheat and ignite flammable materials in storage facilities. Insurers face sizeable claims for fire and explosions in a number of major industrial facilities in their large accounts and facultative portfolio. PCS-Triggered Explosions on Oil Rigs A disgruntled employee gains access to a Network Operations Centre (NOC) controlling a field of oil rigs, and manipulates several of the Platform Control Systems (PCS) to cause structural misalignment of well heads, damage to several rigs, oil and gas release, and fires. At least one platform has a catastrophic explosion. Insurers face significant claims to multiple production facilities in their offshore energy book. Regional Power Outage From Cyber Attack on U.S. Power Generation A well-resourced cyber team infiltrates malware into the control systems of U.S. power generating companies that creates desynchronization in certain types of generators. Sufficient generators are damaged to cause a cascading regional power outage that is complex to repair. Restoration of power to 90 percent of customers takes two weeks. Insurers face claims in many lines of business, including large commercial accounts, energy, homeowners and speciality lines. The scenario is published as a Lloyd’s Emerging Risk Report ‘Business Blackout’ by Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies and was released in RMS CAMS v1.1. Regional Power Outage From Cyber Attack on UK Power Distribution A nation-state plants ‘Trojan Horse’ rogue hardware in electricity distribution substations, which are activated remotely to curtail power distribution and cause rolling blackouts intermittently over a multi-week campaign. Insurers face claims in many lines of business, including large commercial accounts, energy, homeowners and specialty lines. The scenario is published as ‘Integrated Infrastructure’ by Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies, and was released in RMS CAMS v1.1.  

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