Ransomware - Cyber risk expands

We chat Ransomware - Cyber risk expands with Santho Mahopeloa, Senior Cyber Risk Underwriter at Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty. Santho takes us through the local trends regarding ransomware and what lessons they have learnt from their global experience.

Highlighted questions covered:

What is Ransomware and what makes it difficult to track?
Are there any local trends with regards to Ransomware in South Africa?
Are there any lessons you have learnt from your global experience at Allianz?
When it comes to ransomware, what is the actual insured risk and when you underwrite what is that quantifiable potential loss?

Highlighted take away points:

The use of cryptocurrencies has made it difficult to track criminals and cyber culprits, it gives them great anonymity.
It's a costly affair to track cyber criminals.
Due to South Africa and Africa being an immature market with immature legislations, Cyber criminals see it as a soft target.
We are seeing trends of double extortion incidents (encryption of the system and the data), triple extortion incidents ( denial of service attack, encryption of the data and encryption of the systems) and then the extortion of your clients and your service providers.
More than 50% of the actual claims are driven by or spiked by the restoration and BI elements.
On average, the ransomware amount demanded that we are seeing is 5.3 million US dollars.
80% of risk that come across our desks are uninsurable
Due to the technical nature of cyber, it has been a challenge across the market to educate your brokers in respect of such a new and highly technical product.