Insurance: The risks of cyber security threats
Insurers are familiar with the many problems caused by cyberattacks, but how familiar is the industry with the specific types?
The insurance and insurtech industries are more than aware of the potential dangers of cyberattacks. After all, insurers provide coverage to many of the entities that may be vulnerable to or targets of scammers that aim to disrupt business and steal data or monetary funds.
With the issues they face today, what is the insurance industry doing to protect itself from these attacks and how will the current climate of the economy affect the ability of insurers to battle cyberattacks?
What threats should providers be aware of?
Insurtechs and insurance carriers face a variety of threats, including ransomware attacks, data exfiltration, email phishing scams, and dedicated denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
Insurance companies store large amounts of both financial and personal data, which means that any successful cyberattack could have dire consequences for them as a company and for their customers.
It comes as no surprise that the finance and insurance industries are targets of cyberattacks. Along with the possibility of unmitigated data loss, malware and DDoS attacks have the ability to cause disruption to financial institutions while leaving customers without access to services.
The state of the 2022 cyber threat landscape
According to the data from the 2022 IBM Security X-Force Threat Intelligence Index, server access attacks were the most common types of attacks aimed at insurance and finance organizations. In 2021, they accounted for 14 percent.
Common cyber threats insurance organizations face:
- Server access attacks – An attack that involves gaining access to a company’s servers, either by exploiting a system weakness or by using stolen or leaked passwords.
- Ransomware – Malware that prevents a user from accessing their own programs and files until they have paid a ransom to the scammers.
- Credential harvesting – A credential harvesting – or password harvesting – attack involves attackers gathering many compromised user accounts, usually by sending a phishing email attack.
- RATs – Remote access trojans are a type of malware that allows a criminal to remotely control an infected computer including accessing the files and data stored on it.
- Misconfiguration – An attack that occurs when a cybercriminal discovers vulnerabilities in the security configurations of a cloud, application, or web server.
While the IBM Index shows that insurance and finance industries are no longer the most targeted for attacks – that title now belongs to the manufacturing industry – they still accounted for nearly a quarter of the threats (22.4 percent).
Although the number is slightly lower than the previous year, this in no way means that insurtech and fintech companies are in the clear.
Additionally, companies need to be aware of potential weaknesses within their organization that could leave them exposed to cyberattacks. Unfortunately, with recent staff layoffs as well as the rising cost of business operations, both insurtechs and insurance carriers are now as vulnerable as ever.
LenderDock values security
As a company, LenderDock takes possible security threats very seriously. Being SOC 2 certified, LenderDock is exceeding industry standards while protecting your data. Rest assured that your data is safe with LenderDock.