Beazley will link up with a unit of Munich Re to roll out broad cyber protection for the world’s largest companies, with a focus on digital assets and IT infrastructure.

Plans call for Beazley, the largest insurer of cyber liability risks in the Lloyd’s market, to team with Munich Re’s Corporate Insurance Partner unit for the effort. Both worked with a number of large companies and their brokers to develop coverage options, according to the Beazley/Munich Re announcement.

Cover will be tailored specifically to the exposures of individual clients, providing up to $100 million or €100 million of protection for a wide range of cyber risks, including:

• Hacking or malware attacks.Such attacks have been growing steadily in scale and frequency. In the US alone, 193.5 million customer records have been stolen in large breaches involving more than 10 million records apiece in the past two years.
• Denial of Service Attacks.Half of all major US companies sustained a denial of service attack to their websites last year and more than 10 percent of these attacks interrupted the companies’ web-based service capabilities. The potential for significant business interruption losses from a successful DDoS attack is high.
• Cyber extortion.Ransomware attacks have recently intensified. Those that have been disclosed have generally been small in scale. But the potential undoubtedly exists for far larger cyber extortion attempts.
• Property damage and bodily injury exposures from malicious cyber attacks.The impact of an attack on the smooth functioning of plant and machinery and the safety of employees, with the increasing interconnectivity of systems, is becoming more and more severe.

“Beazley and Munich Re have seen significant demand for insurance cover of this type and have already bound insurance for multinational clients seeking the broad protection – both in terms of perils covered and financial limits – that their partnership uniquely affords,” the companies said.

Source: Beazley and Munich Re