What is Cyber Insurance?
Understanding Cyber Insurance and Its Role in Cybersecurity and Operational Resilience
Cyber insurance is a type of insurance coverage to protect organizations from financial losses caused by cyberattacks, including expenses related to data recovery, legal fees and business interruption.
Cyberattacks have increased dramatically in recent years. In 2022, breaches affected more than 422 million individuals, resulting in billions in losses. The cost of a single data breach can be devastating for an organization regardless of size or industry. In fact, some businesses never recover from a data breach and those that do could expend millions in response and recovery fees, with the average breach response costing $4.45 million, a 15% increase over three years.
This is why all organizations should consider cyber insurance coverage. It can help protect your organization from the devastating financial impacts caused by a cyberattack. It can also help cover significant incident response and recovery expenses.
In this cyber insurance knowledgebase, learn more about what cyber insurance is, the types of cyber insurance coverage available, what insurers factor for coverage and pricing, and how to choose the right cyber insurance policy for your organization.
Learn more about:
Getting the Right Data for Coverage
Overcome common business challenges for cyber insurance coverage by ensuring you’ve got the right data you need for your application.
Learn MoreTenable Cyber Insurance Report
Learn more about what cyber insurance is and how you can effectively identify and mitigate your organization’s cyber risk.
Learn MoreJoin Tenable Connect community
Join other professionals interested in learning more about cyber insurance in Tenable Connect.
Learn MoreCommon Questions About Cyber Insurance
Have questions about cyber insurance? Check out this FAQ.
Learn MoreSecure Cyber Insurance Coverage With Confidence
Learn about how to remove cyber insurance application and management complexities with metrics and insight into your cyber risk.
Learn MoreMeet Cyber Insurance Requirements with Tenable
Learn how you can easily demonstrate your organization has implemented best practices to secure cyber insurance coverage.
Learn MoreHow to Obtain the Right Cyber Insurance Coverage
Learn more about how to find the right cyber insurance coverage that aligns with your organization’s cyber risk profile and business goals.
Learn MoreThe Tenable Solution for Cyber Insurance
See how Tenable One can simplify the cyber insurance process so you have confidence you can get and keep the coverage you need.
Learn MoreThe Data You Need for the Cyber Insurance You Want
Tenable’s exposure management platform can help your organization overcome common business challenges by providing accurate, easy-to-understand cybersecurity data to complete a cyber insurance application, secure a cyber insurance policy, and ensure you’re always meeting your coverage requirements.
Best Practices for Building a Hybrid-Cloud Security Strategy
As organizations move critical systems and operations into the cloud, while still managing on-premises assets, the lines around your attack surface blur and dissolve. It can be particularly challenging if you’re trying to use traditional IT cybersecurity controls that weren’t designed to defend the cloud; however, to secure cyber insurance, most carriers will want you to demonstrate (and continuously attest) you’ve implemented best practices for your hybrid-cloud security environment. This will be a key piece cyber insurance underwriters will likely include on your cyber insurance application.
So, what are some best practices your organization can implement to meet these requirements? This guide is a great place to begin. It offers five key steps to consider, complete with insight into why each step is important and recommendations on how to implement them:
- Create a unified access management strategy
- Automate configuration and validation across all cloud
- Adopt DevSecOps and shift controls left
- Strengthen data security
- Use zero trust to unify strategies
Cyber Insurance Insights
7 Steps to Harden Cloud Security Posture
Cloud security breaches are increasingly common. Cyberattackers know many organizations struggle with implementing mature cloud cyber hygiene practices and they’re actively seeking cloud vulnerabilities to take advantage of. They’re looking for stealthy ways to infiltrate your attack surface and hope they can do so for weeks or months before you notice. An unsecured cloud is a doorway they’re trying to sneak through.
Cyber insurers know just how costly a cloud-based breach can be and have seen the impacts when a breach happens within an organization or down the supply chain. That’s why they’re now looking at ways organizations secure the cloud when making decisions about whether or not they’ll offer cyber insurance coverage.
In this white paper, learn more about:
- How you can industrialize your cloud security to prevent breaches
- Real-world cloud breaches and what could have stopped them
- Which cloud-security tools you should adopt and why
- How to determine the success of your cloud security program
The State of Vulnerability Management
For organizations around the globe, it’s no longer about building defenses for “if” you experience a cyberattack, it’s about being proactive for “when” one occurs. Yet, that’s increasingly complicated because even small organizations have a growing attack surface, one that includes more assets, enables remote work and varies from on-premises to the cloud. Most organizations, especially those that don’t use the right vulnerability management tools, struggle to keep up and get further behind the more the threat landscape evolves.
If you're facing these challenges, the reality is you’re not alone. Tenable’s “State of Vulnerability Management” white paper takes a closer look at the current state of the modern vulnerability management landscape, including perspectives about the roles of IT and security teams as they are today and what they would look like in an ideal state.
Explore this white paper to learn more about:
- Key vulnerability management trends
- How to identify, prioritize and remediate vulnerabilities
- The relationship between IT and cybersecurity for vulnerability management
Tenable Connect community: Your go-to resource for cyber insurance
If you have questions about cyber insurance, join Tenable Connect to engage with others with similar interests and to learn more about exposure management and the role it plays in securing and maintaining cyber insurance coverage.
Here are some sample conversations happening now:
Has anyone tried the cyber insurance report template?
I'm running Tenable.io and trying to explore the cyber insurance report template for one of my customers. I cannot find it at the moment, and I was wondering if this is an active feature and/or one that is present in my Tenable subscription?
Read MoreCybersecurity Snapshot: 6 Things That Matter Right Now
Cyber insurance provider Coalition has released its mid-year report, based on an analysis of claims from 160,000 policyholders, and salient findings include small businesses with annual revenue less than $25 million reported claim-cost average of $139,000, which highlights increased vulnerability to cyberattacks.
Read MoreCompTIA: Cybersecurity and Risk Analysis Will Mesh
In its “2023 IT Industry Outlook” report, the nonprofit Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) outlines 10 trends to watch, and one, in particular, caught our eye: the connection between cybersecurity metrics and risk analysis. “This structure can then be used to justify investment, determine skill needs or quantify cyber insurance activity.”
Read MoreFrequently Asked Questions about Cyber Insurance
Are you new to cyber insurance? Do you have questions, but not sure where to start? Check out this cyber insurance FAQ for common questions and answers.
What is cyber insurance?
What does cyber insurance cover?
Does my organization need cyber insurance coverage?
Are there different types of cyber insurance?
What are the benefits of cyber insurance?
Are there any downsides to cyber insurance?
Is there a cyber insurance framework?
Is cyber insurance worth it?
How much does cyber insurance cost?
What’s on a cyber insurance application?
What does cyber insurance cover?
What does cyber insurance not cover?
How do I know how much cyber insurance coverage I need?
How do I choose a cyber insurer?
What is required to get cyber insurance coverage?
Does my general liability insurance cover cyber incidents?
What are cyber insurance exclusions?
Are there risks of not having cyber insurance?
What are some common cyber insurance terms and conditions?
How do I determine my organization’s cyber risk?
What are the regulatory requirements for cyber insurance in my industry?
What does the cyber insurance claim process look like?
Secure Cyber Insurance Coverage With Confidence
Completing a cyber insurance application isn’t second nature for most professionals, especially those who generally manage IT and cybersecurity programs. In the last several years, these applications have shifted from just a few questions to pages and pages that are labor-intensive to complete and don’t always give a comprehensive view of an organization’s security and compliance programs. This creates headaches both for the organizations seeking coverage and the cyber insurers offering it.
Why are these applications growing in complexity? Well, for years many organizations simply had to say they had controls in place and weren’t required to verify it. But, as breaches have increased and cost of response and recovery have skyrocketed, carriers will no longer just take your word for it. They want you to demonstrate your controls actually function as designed and that you’re continually assessing your program for improvements as the threat landscape changes.
Tenable’s Cyber Insurance Report hopes to remove some of these complexities by discussing predefined metrics that Measured Insurance has validated. These metrics give cyber insurance underwriters insight into your organization’s cyber risk posture and will help you secure cyber insurance coverage and ensure your organization’s cybersecurity controls are doing what you say they’ll do, especially if you face an attack and need to use that cyber coverage.
Meet Cyber Insurance Requirements with Tenable
Everything about cyber insurance is complex, especially if it’s not something you deal with on a regular basis. It’s difficult for organizations to know which coverage they need and which carrier they should work with. Applications are detailed and time-consuming and policies are increasingly expensive.
There are even challenges for the insurers, too. They struggle with effectively pricing risk, which is generally based on long questionnaires that don’t paint a clear picture of your organization’s actual risk or what you’re doing to proactively mitigate risk and decrease the likelihood of a cyber breach.
Ultimately, getting and maintaining cyber insurance coverage is all about your organization’s ability to demonstrate you have implemented best practice cybersecurity controls and that you have processes in place to routinely evaluate your controls and find and close gaps before threat actors find a way into your attack surface. What exactly that looks like varies from company to company, but there are some common areas of focus to consider and address. A simplified way to do this is to evaluate your program against Tenable’s cyber insurance checklist, which includes a list of common cyber insurance eligibility questions and an overview of how Tenable’s exposure management platform can help ensure you’re meeting those requirements.
Here are some of the key questions you may be asked when completing a cyber insurance application:
- Do you have a process for discovering and maintaining a complete inventory of your cyber assets?
- Do you monitor your external attack surface - internet-facing systems?
- Are you regularly doing vulnerability assessments against all your known assets?
- Do you regularly perform misconfiguration assessments against all your known assets?
For a complete list of the questions, along with recommendations on how Tenable can help you answer and demonstrate compliance on your cyber insurance application, download this cyber insurance checklist.
Streamline Processes and Evidence Gathering to Secure Cyber Insurance
With Tenable One, an exposure management platform, your organization can successfully complete cyber insurance applications with confidence, knowing you’ve accurately assessed your cyber risk and have all the data you need to secure your cyber program — and prove compliance to a cyber insurance underwriter.
Cyber Insurance Blog Bytes
How To Obtain the Right Cybersecurity Insurance for Your Business
As organizations of all sizes across all industries face increased risk of cyberattacks, it’s increasingly important to obtain cyber insurance coverage. Yet, most organizations don’t understand which cyber insurance company to work with or what type of coverage they need. In this blog, learn more about how you can find the right policy that aligns best with your risk profile — at a fair price.
CISOs Play an Important Role in Procuring Cyber Insurance Coverage
If your organization wants to get cyber insurance coverage, you’ll have to go through an underwriting process to demonstrate to the carrier that you’ve got proper controls in place to protect against cyber incidents and that they work as designed. In this blog, learn more about the role CISOs play in this important process and how it’s changing and the industry evolves.
Meet Your Cyber Insurance Requirements With Tenable
Finding the right cyber insurance underwriter, choosing the right policy and coverage limits and types, completing an application and maintaining compliance for coverage is increasingly challenging. It’s time-consuming and the cost of these policies is increasingly expensive.
The challenges are twofold. On one side, underwriters have ever-growing questionnaires that don’t actually paint a complete picture of your organization’s cyber risk. On the other side, your teams will likely struggle to answer those questionnaires and may never actually understand what your real cyber risk actually is.
Tenable One can help simplify the cyber insurance process so you have the confidence you can get and keep the coverage you need, even as your organization changes or scales.
Foundational Cybersecurity
Get risk information across key pillars like vulnerability assessment and management, Active Directory (AD), external attack surface management, cloud security and more.
Comprehensive Visibility
Discover and map all of your assets so you can identify, prioritize and remediate vulnerabilities and other security issues across your entire attack surface, both on-prem and in the cloud.
Know Your Cyber Risk
Identify and accurately communicate your organization’s cyber risk to support optimal business performance and decrease the likelihood of a successful cyber breach.
See Tenable One in Action
With Tenable One, your organization will get comprehensive visibility across your entire attack surface to ensure cyber insurance readiness including vulnerability management, identity security, cloud security and more.
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- Tenable Vulnerability Management
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