Together with Symantec Corporation, it promises to deliver a better understanding of the most damaging cyber attacks

Hack, cyber

Guy Carpenter announced this week the formation of a strategic alliance with Symantec Corporation, a global leader in cybersecurity, to create a cyber aggregation model. 

The model will include a comprehensive catalogue of cyber scenarios from which insurers can derive frequency and severity distributions to measure the potential financial impact of loss from both affirmative cyber coverages and “silent” all-risk policies where cyber is the peril, but no cyber exclusions exist. 

“By combining Guy Carpenter’s risk management and catastrophe modeling expertise with Symantec’s technical knowledge and proprietary data, we are pioneering a cyber aggregation model to help reinsurers gain a better understanding of their correlated cyber risks and to manage and protect their capital in extreme cyber scenarios,” said Guy Carpenter U.S operations chief executive Tim Gardner. 

Cyber attacks are estimated to cost businesses as much as $400bn a year, and the systemic nature of the risk means (re)insurers can suffer losses from multiple insureds across vast geographies from a single event, exposing infrastructure, supply chain, and other interconnected risks.  

On the same note, Marsh and TheCityUK released a report stating that firms across the financial and related professional services industry need to take urgent action on cyber risk. The report, Cyber and The City, provides a series of practical recommendations to improve cyber resilience, and it proposes the creation of a city-wide cyber forum to promote collaboration across all firms within the sector.