Cyber insurance provider, Coalition, has announced the mid-year update to its 2022 Cyber Claims Report detailing the evolution of cyber trends, revealing that small businesses have become bigger targets, overall incidents are down, and ransomware attacks are declining as demands go unpaid.

These figures highlight that small businesses have become a prime target for ransomware criminals, because they understand they don’t have the resources to effectively defend their networks, which often results in them paying demands.
However, it is positive to see that demands are going down.
Cyber insurance is a relatively new industry and many providers are still evaluating what they will and will not provide cover for. Just a few weeks ago, we saw cover for nation-state attacks being removed from Lloyds of London policies, which puts many organisations in a very difficult position.
It is therefore advised that organisations focus more on the prevention of attacks, rather than the remediation through insurance policies, as claims are never guaranteed.
This means educating staff on cyber threats, implementing good security hygiene practices, such as MFA and monthly patch management cycles. However, if organisations don’t have the internal resources to manage this task, outsourcing is the best solution.
Insurance should be about covering costs in response and recovery in an incident and not about paying ransoms. More and more countries are making paying ransoms illegal.
The report highlights the impact of starving criminals of their gravy train.