RMS Releases Industry's First Probabilistic Cyber Risk Model

Newark, Calif. - March 07, 2018 At its annual cyber risk seminar in New York City, RMS, a leading global risk modeling and analytics firm, announced the release of a new generation of its cyber risk management platform, RMS® Cyber Solutions, containing major new capabilities to help expand the cyber insurance market.

The new platform, v3.0, is the insurance industry's first probabilistic model for cyber loss, providing losses at different return periods for all five of the major cyber loss processes*, enabling insurers to allocate risk capital and to design products and risk solutions that reflect the full nature of cyber risk.

The new release also adds additional functionality to apply to reinsurance of cyber losses, providing financial perspectives to all reinsurance stakeholders. In addition, it provides tools to allow model users to incorporate their own loss experience into the model and develop their own view of risk.

The release extends the functionality for insurers to analyze their 'silent' cyber exposure in other classes of insurance, such as property damage, energy, and marine, by relating policy terms and conditions and linking to portfolios of property exposure data in the RMS EDM™, the data standard used by most of the insurance industry.

RMS® Cyber Solutions also incorporates new analytics for selecting and pricing individual accounts, and for quantifying loss probabilities for cyber risk rating factors. RMS has new partnerships with leading security ratings providers BitSight and SecurityScorecard to improve the predictive power of rating individual companies. RMS has been working with both providers to calibrate its cyber loss experience data with telematics information that provides insight into the vulnerabilities and risk factors of a company's security posture and attack surface.

Adam Sandler, head of cyber solutions at RMS, said: "RMS clients are seeing demand for cyber insurance growing rapidly and their ability to pursue this opportunity is constrained by their ability to allocate risk capital with confidence. Cyber is still relatively unknown and doesn't behave like other perils. Our clients' highest priority request to RMS over the past couple of years has been for cyber loss probabilities, particularly for our accumulation scenarios, to assess the cost of capital needed to support this growth opportunity. With this release, we are answering that need. Our new solution offers a platform for integrating models, data, and analytics, to provide a comprehensive and responsive way forward for cyber insurers."

Dr. Christos Mitas, head of cyber model development at RMS said: "Statistical experience data only provides a few years of benchmarking, and the patterns of loss continue to shift. Our models show that loss processes such as contagious malware have the capability to scale and trigger large losses much more easily than others, such as data exfiltration, where attackers target individual companies to steal their sensitive data, or cloud outage, which is currently limited by the customer base of cloud service providers."

The new release is the third generation of cyber model from RMS and has been renamed to Cyber Solutions Platform 3.0, from 'RMS Cyber Accumulation Management System', to mark its expanded functionality.

Additional information on RMS Cyber Solutions is available here.

Notes to Editors:

The five of the major cyber loss processes are:

Data Exfiltration

Contagious Malware

Financial Theft

Cloud Outages

Denial of Service Attacks

Additional details on the RMS 2018 Cyber Risk Outlook here.