CEO Fraud—also known as Business Email Compromise—related cyber-insurance claims accounted for nearly a quarter of all claims in the EMEA region, AIG said.
Catalin Cimpanu reported for ZDNet that Business email compromise (BEC) has overtaken ransomware and data breaches as the main reason companies filed a cyber-insurance claim in the EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Asia) region last year, said insurance giant AIG.
According to statistics published in July, AIG said that BEC-related insurance filings accounted for nearly a quarter (23%) of all cyber-insurance claims the company received in 2018.
Ransomware-related incidents came in in second place, accounting for 18% of all cyber-insurance claims in the EMEA region, followed by claims for data breaches caused by hackers and data breaches caused by employee negligence (e.g. sending data to the wrong person), both with 14%.
All in all, AIG said that cyber-insurance claims nearly doubled between 2017 and 2018 and that they received more cyber-insurance claims last year than in 2016 and 2017 combined.
Ransomware-related Claims Expected To Grow
But despite BEC ranking first, AIG expects that ransomware may soon reclaim its top spot, which it held in the previous year, in 2017, when ransomware-related claims accounted for 26% of all cyber-insurance claims.
The number of ransomware-related cyber-insurance claims dropped in 2018 because ransomware attacks, in general, became more targeted.
Nowadays, ransomware gangs tend to go after companies and government organizations, rather than home consumers. The incidents are fewer, but the payouts for criminal gangs are larger. ZDNet has the full story, with quite a bit more detail:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/bec-overtakes-ransomware-and-data-breaches-in-cyber-insurance-claims/