Tag Archive for: sees

The $10 billion cyber-insurance industry sees a dangerous year in cybercrime ahead. AI, ransomware, and war are its biggest concerns

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It’s rare to find an insurance policy against war breaking out, but there’s a $10 billion market for cyber-insurance that guards against the threat of ransomware attacks. With the world as violent and turbulent as it is right now, though, lines between the two are blurring.

The ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza have insurers on such high alert that many simply aren’t offering coverage any longer, on top of which AI is creating new and unpredictable cybersecurity risks. And insurers expect a “significant” increase in hacks in 2024, to boot.

Those were the three key findings of a new report on cyber-insurance trends from consultancy Woodruff Sawyer. Insuring against cybercrime has grown from a tiny niche to a $10 billion market, with firms that offer coverage ranging from small specialty carriers to household names such as Chubb and Travelers. They offer coverage for losses incurred relating to companies’ IT and computer systems—for example, if companies are hacked and lose data or have to pay ransoms to get it back.

Woodruff Sawyer surveyed over 40 of its clients and found that the industry has a gloomy outlook this year: 56% of respondents said they believed cyber risk would “increase greatly” in 2024. They pointed to ransomware and war-associated risks as two of their biggest concerns.

“If you have an attack that is part of a war campaign, it can affect private companies across the globe that have nothing to do with war,” said Woodruff Sawyer national cyber practice leader Dan Burke in an interview with Fortune. “That is the true risk that’s elevated by conflict and war and geopolitical tension. That’s really what underwriters are mostly concerned about.”

A famous example of this type of ransomware attack was a virus called NotPetya, which circulated in 2017. Originating in Ukraine, it quickly went global and compromised the computer systems of dozens of companies, including drug giant Merck and shipping company Maersk. The White House estimated it caused $10 billion in damages.

“The NotPetya attack was a Russian-based attack against an accounting software in Ukraine. And it turns out that that specific piece of software was used by multinational…

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Finland sees fourfold spike in ransomware attacks since joining NATO, senior cyber official says

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Ransomware attacks targeting Finnish organizations have increased four-fold since the Nordic country began the process of joining NATO last year, according to a senior official.

In an interview with Recorded Future News on Thursday, Sauli Pahlman, the deputy director general for Finland’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), cautioned that “correlation doesn’t equal causality,” but said he believed the surge in cases was linked to geopolitics.

Finland, which had historically declared itself to be a non-aligned country – in part due to troubled relations with Russia, with whom it shares a 830-mile border – applied to join NATO following the invasion of Ukraine.

In June, the country expelled nine diplomats from the Russian embassy in Helsinki and accused them of undertaking intelligence missions in contravention of the Vienna convention on diplomatic relations.

The expulsion of alleged Russian intelligence officers throughout Europe prompted the head of Finnish Security Intelligence Service (SUPO) to warn last year that Russia would “turn to the cyber environment” for espionage due to challenges impacting its human intelligence work.

At the time, SUPO’s director Antti Pelttari said that the agency considered it “unlikely that any cyberattack will paralyze critical infrastructure [in Finland] in the near future.”

NCSC’s Pahlman echoed this position, telling Recorded Future News he didn’t “consider it very likely that we [will] really see a cyber incident in Finland that really closes down something that’s critical for society — food, electricity, water — on a wide scale.”

But the NCSC still issued a public alert last September, elevating the cyber threat level to encourage organizations and the public to be aware of the potential for disruptive incidents. The threat level “continues to be elevated as we speak, the situation hasn’t changed,” said Pahlman.

The number of cyber incidents which Pahlman said were clearly perpetrated by state-sponsored actors “has not, at least up to today, increased in a way that I could say that there has really been a step-up. [But] what we can certainly say is that the ransomware cases — which tend to have much…

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Q&A on How Dell Sees Security at the Edge

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Edge computing modern IT technology on virtual screen.
Image: Adobe Stock

In May 2023, Dell announced NativeEdge, an edge operations software platform. Dell has been talking to customers for years in advance of the release about the needs of technology operating at the edge.

To get into the details, I spoke with Aaron Chaisson, Dell Technologies’ vice president of telecom and edge solutions marketing, at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas. The following is a transcript of my interview with Chaisson; the interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Jump to:

Challenges of cloud spending and deployment

Megan Crouse: What decisions are you seeing customers or potential customers struggle with right now in terms of enterprise cloud purchasing that weren’t being talked about a year or three years ago?

Aaron Chaisson: One of the biggest things that companies are looking to do is there is an interest in being able to consume (cloud) in an as-a-service fashion. They want to take the experiences they are getting from hyperscalers and potentially be able to bring those experiences on-prem, especially toward the edge. Customers want to leverage edge technologies to drive new business outcomes, to be able to act upon data more rapidly. How do they take the capabilities, the features and the experiences that they get from a cloud and deliver those in edge environments?

One of the questions that we commonly see is: Are you taking established cloud technologies and moving them to the edge? Or are you really looking to use the best practices of cloud, of automation and orchestration-as-a-service, but to deliver it in a more purpose-built fashion that delivers unique value to the edge? And that’s really where NativeEdge is designed to be able to deliver an edge experience, but in a customized way that targets outcomes that customers are looking to at the edge.

SEE: Don’t curb your enthusiasm: Trends and challenges in edge computing (TechRepublic)

Customers choose between edge and on-prem

Megan Crouse: Do you see customers deciding workflow-by-workflow, where they’re going to pull from the edge, and if so, how is Dell working on simplifying that process through something like NativeEdge?

Aaron Chaisson: It’s early days for the…

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Cooperation or competition? China’s security industry sees the US, not AI, as the bigger threat

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BEIJING — After years of breakneck growth, China’s security and surveillance industry is now focused on shoring up its vulnerabilities to the United States and other outside actors, worried about risks posed by hackers, advances in artificial intelligence and pressure from rival governments.

The renewed emphasis on self-reliance, combating fraud and hardening systems against hacking was on display at the recent Security China exhibition in Beijing, illustrating just how difficult it will be to get Beijing and Washington to cooperate even as researchers warn that humankind faces common risks from AI. The show took place just days after China’s ruling Communist Party warned officials of the risks posed by artificial intelligence.

Looming over the four-day meet: China’s biggest geopolitical rival, the United States. American-developed AI chatbot ChatGPT was a frequent topic of conversation, as were U.S. efforts to choke off China’s access to cutting-edge technology.

“This new technology contains a great potential danger,” said Fan Weicheng, Director of Tsinghua University’s Center for Public Safety Research. He clicked through a presentation featuring an AI-generated figure of Barack Obama speaking, illustrating the risks of deceptive images and video that can now be digitally created.

“The United States has a 21st century national security strategy. Russia has a national security strategy. Germany has a strategy. So does Japan,” Fan said. “We in China are also working on this.”

Chinese academics, Fan says, are working on an “early warning system” to identify and manage potentially disruptive technology, creating indexes and formulas to measure the impact emerging technology could have on China’s national security.

In the past decade, China’s AI technology has made rapid advances, fueled in part through cooperation with American research institutes and tech firms. As in the U.S., Chinese leaders are worried about advances in artificial intelligence.

A vendor sits near a board depicting surveillance cameras during...

A vendor sits near a board depicting surveillance cameras during Security China 2023 in Beijing, on June 9, 2023. After years of breakneck growth, China’s security and surveillance industry is now focused on shoring…

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