How Leen Powers Cyber Insurance Underwriting

Today, we want everything we touch digitally to be secure. Every tech company implements measures to safeguard their infrastructure from cyber threats and related liabilities. Yet, despite these efforts, breaches still happen, as we've seen with numerous high-profile incidents in recent years.

Cyber insurance offers businesses a way to mitigate the financial fallout from cyber incidents, often covering the costs that arise from sophisticated attacks or negligence.

However, underwriting cyber risk comes with many challenges. Let’s take a look at a few of those:

• For cyber insurance underwriters, accurate risk assessment is everything! Which means, today, with the scale of threats, underwriting is more complex than ever before, with insurers needing access to real-time, comprehensive data to evaluate the security postures of their clients.
• There is a vast amount of data out there, and you don’t necessarily have the time to delve into it to find out the information you need to make informed risk selection decisions. You must get access to good quality data, understand that data, and know what to do with it.
• As an extension, to make informed decisions, you need to separate meaningful insights from the noise, and focus only on the factors that truly impact the risk exposure. The key indicators often differ depending on the industry and company size, making it essential to tailor the approach accordingly.

Take the example of a mid-sized tech company applying for cyber insurance. They might have tools like CrowdStrike for endpoint protection, Tenable for vulnerability management, and Snyk for application security, but without a unified view of how these tools interact with and complement each other, underwriters could miss critical insights.

Cyber Insurance Underwriting Requires Inside-out Perspective

When assessing a company's cyber risk posture, most insurers rely on an "outside-in" approach, scanning external security postures like exposed assets and vulnerabilities (these include but not limited to improperly secured public IPs, open ports, misconfigured DNS records, etc.). While this is valuable, it often only provides a partial view of the company’s true risk profile. To get a comprehensive understanding, insurers need an "inside-out" perspective, looking deeper into internal security practices, vulnerabilities, and configurations. Unfortunately, gathering this level of insight has traditionally been difficult, leaving insurers without a complete view to make fully informed underwriting decisions.

How real-time security data drives better outcomes in pre-sales & post-sales phases

In the pre-sales phase, cyber insurers focus on assessing a customer’s risk posture to determine the appropriate coverage and premiums. This involves evaluating external and internal security practices to understand potential vulnerabilities. The stronger a company’s security posture, the more favorable the terms and premiums can be.

In the post-sales phase, many insurers offer services like incident response to support customers in the event of a cyberattack. Access to real-time data from a customer’s security tools is crucial for effectively managing incidents. This data helps detect and identify threats, assess the damage, helps in recovery, and guide post-incident analysis and assessment to prevent future breaches.

For customers, it’s a no-brainer – sharing key security data with insurers leads to better outcomes; potentially lower premiums for strong security practices and posture, and access to experts who can respond swiftly and effectively if a cyber incident occurs. It ensures that both sides are prepared and equipped with the right information to minimize risk.

Advantage for cyber insurers & their customers

By aggregating and normalizing data from a variety of security tools, Leen's Unified API provides cyber insurance companies with a clear, holistic view of their customers’ security environments. Its access to reliable, real-time data which results in faster, more accurate underwriting decisions, ultimately strengthening relationships with their clients. Not only does it streamline policy issuance, but it also allows for continuous monitoring of risk throughout the policy term.

With the right tools for precise risk evaluation, Leen is setting a new standard for cyber insurance underwriting, empowering insurers to navigate today’s complex risk landscape with confidence.

For more information on how cyber insurance underwriters leverage Leen’s Unified APIs, schedule a call with our founders here.

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