According to broker Marsh, claims in 2023 bashed through all previous records
After receiving more than 1,800 cyber insurance claim reports from US and Canadian clients in 2023, Marsh announced that last year broke all previous records for this type of claim filing.
The broker went on to identify driving factors
Among the reasons for the rising number of cyber insurance claims, according to Marsh, included that the sophistication of these digital attacks is rising. Moreover, the MOVEit file transfer supply chain incident’s sheer scale drove up claims. Privacy claims also increased. Finally, there has been a rise in the number of businesses and other organizations that have invested in the coverage, meaning that when they are affected, it leads to claims.
Last year, approximately one fifth (21 percent) of Marsh clients reported having experienced at least one digital attack. This was a slight increase over 2018, when that figure was 18 percent. At the same time, there has been an increase in the proportion of covered businesses that reported having experienced a minimum of one digital event in the last five years, ranging from – but staying within – 16 percent and 21 percent.
Some industries file more cyber insurance claims than others
Of all the industries from which organizations filed claims in 2023, it was the healthcare industry that filed the most. This has been the case since 2020, said Marsh. In fact, in 2023, the healthcare industry comprised 17 percent of all digital attack claims. This was closely followed by communications, which filed 16 percent of the claims, education’s 9 percent, the retail and wholesale industry’s 8 percent, and finally 8 percent from financial institutions.
Extortion
More troubling figures came from the rates of extortion being listed within the claims. The Marsh report showed that among the cyber insurance claims filed in 2023, 283 involved at least one instance of extortion, such as in the case of ransomware. This represented a substantial increase over the year before. In 2022, there were 172 companies that reported extortion events, which was clearly notably lower than 2023. Interestingly, that figure was also lower than the figure from 2021 and 2020.
