Listen to this articleCysurance is cyber insurance made easy for growing businesses. They deliver affordable coverage, underwritten by Chubb, for the cyber risks that most impact local and regional businesses. Using a technology-based platform, they’re able to eliminate applications and underwriting and save insureds time and money in the event of a claim. Below is our recent interview with Kirsten Bay, CEO & Co-Founder at Cysurance:
Q: For those who haven’t heard of it, what is the best way to describe Cysurance?
A: We offer our solution as an add-on to third-party service providers’ products, integrating with them to leverage existing knowledge of a client’s business and cyber capabilities to streamline risk analysis. Because we’re a licensed insurance entity, we also give providers’ the authority to bind policies, manage renewals and bill premiums for their customers, further reducing friction.
This arrangement also lets us use the vendor’s monitoring tools, or our own proprietary sensor, to record anomalous network traffic in our blockchain for irrefutable proof of breach, helping claims adjusters quickly establish loss characteristics and process payments. The monitor also triggers our smart contract, automatically initiating a fully covered, no-deductible incident response team to begin remediation, reducing system downtime.
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Q: You’ve recently announced a new partnership with Red Sky Alliance; could you tell us something more?
A: We’re very excited to partner with Red Sky as their threat intelligence product RedXray is a perfect complement to our cyber insurance policy. Together these platforms provide a cyber risk solution that both informs and protects. By educating growing businesses with daily tailored analyses of the specific cyber threats faced by their company and supply chain, local and regional businesses – many of whom think they’re too small to be the target of a cyberattack – realize just how much of a risk they face. With this knowledge they can make more strategic investments in cybersecurity and cyber insurance, update both over time to align with evolving operations and risks and justify costs to stakeholders. Red Sky can now offer its customers a differentiating solution to a specific pain point, and Cysurance insureds can access risk mitigating data to reduce their chance of loss and help demonstrate due care in the event of a claim.
Q: What’s the biggest challenge for growing businesses when it comes to cyber-security?
A: That very question underlines the biggest challenge, in our opinion. Because for true cyber resiliency, companies need to start thinking beyond cybersecurity and seek to achieve the cyber risk management trifecta of cybersecurity, cyber governance, and cyber insurance.
Many growing businesses focus almost exclusively on security technology when considering cyber risk, but even the best cybersecurity tools can’t prevent all cyberattacks. With hackers constantly devising new methodologies and attack vectors and employee error remaining a leading cause of data breaches, companies must also develop robust cyber governance and insurance programs. By training employees TO RECOGNIZE MALICIOUS EMAILS and developing incident response plans, for example, companies can reduce both the likelihood and severity of a loss. Cyber insurance, meanwhile, could be the difference between surviving a breach or going out of business – especially as business interruption and legal and regulatory costs continue to rise and more states enact stricter privacy laws.
Q: Can you give us insights into your services?
A: Our solution is essentially cyber insurance as a service. By eliminating or automating some of the more complex aspects of insurance, like applications, underwriting, claim notification and incident response, and delivering it via customers’ existing providers, we significantly simplify cyber risk transfer for insureds.
Our coverage includes enhanced Business Interruption and Extra Expense language; ransomware, social engineering and cybercrime exposures; and cloud-based extortion scenarios. The policy also has future-proofing features like a broadened definition of Protected Information that includes biometrics, internet browsing history and personally identifiable photos and videos; coverage anywhere in the universe to address evolving data hosting and storing capabilities, and Extortion Expenses that explicitly include cryptocurrencies.
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Q: What’s next for Cysurance? Do you have plans to grow, expand or diversify?
A: Yes – in fact we’re excited to announce we’ve just increased our capacity and can now offer policy limits of up to $2 million dollars and insure businesses with up to $100 million in revenue. We’ve also just become licensed in Canada and are close to finalizing a distribution agreement with our first local partner.
