Willis Re, the reinsurance business of Willis Towers Watson P.L.C., said Monday it has added silent cyber to its cyber risk portfolio modeling tool PRISM-Re.
The model now incorporates the likelihood of a loss resulting from silent cyber and overlays this against client-specific non-cyber limits profiles and loss severity curves to generate a full loss distribution for silent cyber loss potential in isolation, or in conjunction with affirmative cyber loss, the reinsurance brokerage said in a statement.
The likelihood of loss is derived from the responses of around 750 insurance professionals to Willis Re’s 2017 silent cyber survey, which focused on the extent to which the cyber aspect of exposure would increase the likelihood of a covered loss to various industry segments in the property, other liability, auto and workers compensation lines of business, according to the statement.
PRISM-Re was first launched by Willis Re in February 2015.
“The addition of silent cyber to PRISM-Re represents another significant innovation by our highly skilled analytics team,” Jess Fung, head of cyber modeling for Willis Re, said in the statement. “Our model can now generate a full probabilistic frequency and severity loss distribution for silent cyber loss potential in isolation, or in conjunction with affirmative cyber and allows insurers to monitor changes in cyber exposure composition at different probability levels.”
Rick Welsh, chief executive of U.K.-based data and analytics firm Sciemus Ltd., has said that insurers and reinsurers are not sufficiently equipped to underwrite and model cyber exposure and lack the required capacity to address the rising threat of an aggregation of losses from “silent” cyber attacks, Artemis.bm reported. Silent cyber risks are potentially catastrophic losses that may be claimed on policies that don’t actually state whether cyber-attack is covered or excluded.