Zurich Insurance CEO: Cyberattacks Will Be ‘Uninsurable’

As cyberattacks grow, they will become “uninsurable,” the CEO of Europe’s Zurich insurance said.

Speaking to the Financial Times on Monday (Dec. 26), Mario Greco said that cyberattacks could pose a larger threat to insurers than systemic issues like pandemics and climate change.

“What will become uninsurable is going to be cyber,” Greco said. “What if someone takes control of vital parts of our infrastructure, the consequences of that?”

It’s not just a matter of data privacy, he added.

“First off, there must be a perception that this is not just data … this is about civilization,” he said. “These people can severely disrupt our lives.”

Greco told the FT there was a limit to what the private sector can absorb when it came to underwriting losses from cyberattacks.

He said the world’s governments need to “set up private-public schemes to handle systemic cyber risks that can’t be quantified, similar to those that exist in some jurisdictions for earthquakes or terror attacks.”

As PYMNTS wrote earlier this year, incidents such as the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack in May 2021 have shown the vulnerabilities that exist within the system.

“The more you can get out in front to mitigate risks proactively, the more you can maybe not always prevent these incidents but prevent them from having the big material impact,” Chris Finan, chief operating officer of cybersecurity firm ActZero, told PYMNTS soon after the attack. “Almost everybody is grappling with this.”

PYMNTS research has found that 85% of healthcare organizations reported seeing a growing number of cyberattack risks over the last year, with 58% of IT professionals saying their organizations were the target of ransomware attacks.

Hackers are attracted to virtual healthcare as it offers them a wealth of vulnerable data, with services often happening on a patient’s smartphone or laptop, according to the “Digital Identity Tracker,” a PYMNTS and Jumio collaboration.

Financial institutions (FIs) have fallen prey to cyberattacks as well. As PYMNTS reported Nov. 1, the number of ransomware attacks reported by FIs in 2021 was double the number that occurred in 2020.

The number jumped 108% from 602 in 2020 to 1,251 in 2021, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) reported in its latest Financial Trend Analysis report.

The dollar amounts involved in those incidents climbed 68% from $527 million in 2020 to $886 million in 2021, the FCI report said.