Skip to main content

Insurers warn about cyber security.

 

Cyber security

The chief executive of one of Europe’s biggest insurers has warned that cyber attacks, rather than natural catastrophes, will become uninsurable as disruption from hacks continues to grow.

Insurance executives have become more vocal about systemic risks, such as pandemics and climate change, that have tested the sector’s ability to provide coverage in recent years. As a result, for the second year in a row, natural catastrophe-related claims are expected to top $100bn.

But Mario Greco, chief executive at insurer Zurich, told the Financial Times that cyber was a risk to watch.

«First off, there must be a perception that this is not just data . . . This is about civilisation. These people can severely disrupt our lives».

Spiralling cyber losses have prompted emergency measures by underwriters to limit exposure. As well as pushing up prices, some insurers have responded by tweaking policies so that clients retain more losses. In addition, there are exemptions written into policies for certain types of attacks.

At the time, Lloyd’s executive said the move was «responsible» and preferable to waiting until «after everything has gone wrong».

But the difficulty of identifying those behind attacks and their affiliations makes such exemptions legally fraught. Moreover, cyber experts have warned that rising prices and more extensive exceptions could put people off buying any protection.

Greco said there was a limit to how much the private sector could absorb underwriting all the losses from cyber attacks. He called on governments to «set up private-public schemes to handle systemic cyber risks that can’t be quantified, similar to those in some jurisdictions for earthquakes or terror attacks».

www.sba.tax

Comments

Cloud Bookkeeping

Google has launched its Bard chat­bot.

  Google has launched its Bard chat­bot in a move to rival OpenAI’s pop­u­lar Chat­GPT, as it seeks to make up lost ground in the race to com­mer­cial­ise gen­er­at­ive arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence tech­no­logy. Google said that Bard, which provides answers to text­based ques­tions, will be run sep­ar­ately from its Google Search engine. In recent weeks, gen­er­at­ive AI has also been integ­rated into widely used pro­ductiv­ity applic­a­tions, such as Google’s Work­space includ­ing Google Docs and Gmail, and Microsoft’s Office 365 soft­ware, as well as into pop­u­lar apps such as Duolingo, allow­ing mil­lions of people to start inter­act­ing with the tech­no­logy. «We want to get feed­back and gradu­ally phase up the num­ber of people who have access to Bard, and the reason for that is we want to be able to test and learn from that before we roll it out very widely,» said Zoubin Ghahramani, vice-pres­id­ent of Google Research. Bard is built on top of Google’s AI tech­no­logy known a...

US producer price index.

 The pro­du­cer price index, which is often regarded as a lead­ing indic­ator of where con­sumer infla­tion is headed in sev­eral months, rose 0.7 per cent last month from Decem­ber, the US Bur­eau of Labor Stat­ist­ics said yes­ter­day, that sur­passed eco­nom­ists’ expect­a­tions for a 0.4 per cent increase. On an annual basis, the PPI, which tracks prices paid to US pro­du­cers for goods and ser­vices, was up 6 per cent from a year ago. That marked a mod­er­a­tion from 6.5 per cent in Decem­ber but came in well above mar­ket fore­casts for 5.4 per cent. Last month, a block­buster non-farm payrolls report showed the US eco­nomy added more than half a mil­lion jobs in Janu­ary, and the job­less rate fell to a 53year-low of 3.4 per cent. Fed chair Jay Pow­ell then warned rates might rise more than investors expect as the firm labour mar­ket could mean it takes longer for the Fed to hit its 2 per cent tar­get. The S&P 500 was down 0.6 per cent in morn­ing trad­ing, hav­ing man­a...

Inflation fell in Germany and Spain.

 Infla­tion fell rap­idly in two of Europe’s largest eco­nom­ies in March after a sharp drop in energy costs des­pite rises in the price of other goods and ser­vices. Ger­man con­sumer prices rose 7.8 per cent year-on-year on a har­mon­ised basis, down from the pre­vi­ous month’s rate of 9.3 per cent but higher than the 7.5 per cent fore­cast by eco­nom­ists polled by Reu­ters. The fig­ures came hours after Spain’s annual infla­tion rate almost halved to 3.1 per cent for March, from 6 per cent the pre­vi­ous month. Euro area gov­ern­ment bonds sold off after the coun­try’s infla­tion fig­ures were pub­lished. Yields on Ger­man two-year debt rose 0.13 per­cent­age points to 2.8 per cent as investors bet that bor­row­ing costs in the euro­zone would rise fur­ther. The ECB has raised interest rates swiftly in response to a surge in infla­tion over the past year, rais­ing its bench­mark deposit rate from minus 0.5 per cent the last sum­mer to 3 per cent. However, some mem­bers of the g...