A future global cyber attack could cause as much economic damage as a major natural disaster like 2012’s Superstorm Sandy, cyber insurance provider Lloyd’s of London wrote in a recent report.
Economic losses could soar to $53 billion and beyond worldwide following an attack on a major cloud service provider, the study, co-written by Lloyd’s and risk-modeling firm Cyence, found.
A primary impetus of the report was to provide cyber insurance providers with better data about losses following cyber attacks and relative risks posed by their clients. Interest in cyber insurance has grown following the WannaCry and NotPetya attacks in May and June.
The report is based on a hypothetical attack on a cloud service provider during which hackers introduce malicious code into the provider’s software that would trigger crashes one year later on connected machines. During that incubation period, the malware would spread to a huge swath of organizations across a variety of industries. Ultimately, all would lose income and operations uptime as a result.
There’s no doubt that future cyber attacks will be larger and more impactful from an economic standpoint. To illustrate this, the report writers drew a comparison between their hypothetical attack and the recent ransomware attacks. WannaCry resulted in roughly $8 billion in economic losses worldwide after spreading to more than 100 countries. NotPetya caused about $850 million in losses. The hypothetical – but entirely feasible – attack described in the report, on the other hand, has the potential to cause as much as $121 billion in damages, with $53 billion deemed the most likely outcome. As much as $45 billion of that would likely not be covered by current cyber insurance policies held by businesses, which for the most part are under-insured, the report claims.
On top of losses caused by the cloud service hack, subsequent attacks on operating systems on computers at affected organizations could cause an additional $9.7 to $28.7 in damages, Lloyd’s and Cyence wrote.
Purchasing adequate cyber insurance is critical to safeguarding your business or organization against catastrophic loss following a cyber attack on your own network or on one of your service providers. But it won’t fully prevent huge losses to productivity and revenue that follow an attack like the one described in Lloyd’s report.
Choosing a secure enterprise cloud service provider for document storage and team collaboration can help reduce the likelihood that you’ll be one of the victims of an attack like the one in the Lloyd’s report. Encrypting data and files and controlling it with DRM can also help protect your IP and sensitive information if your systems — or those of one of your partners or providers — are compromised.
Vaultize is an innovative data security company that allows customers to track and control their documents from creation to deletion on any device, anywhere. From CYA to compliance, Vaultize provides data protection without restricting use. Vaultize’s platform utilizes DRM and encryption to secure any and every file, protect those files no matter where they travel, and provide visibility into who is accessing them and how they are being used. The Vaultize platform is nearly transparent to users, scalable and flexible to deploy. For more information, visit www.vaultize.com.
