CFC says having cyber protection can be like living in a “lovely exclusive neighbourhood” where the risk of crime is vastly reduced.

The global cyber specialist’s clients receive constant “threat hunting” and vulnerability scans, head of proactive insurance Jason Hart says.

This turns cyber insurance “from a promise to pay to a promise to protect”.

“The properties within the CFC neighbourhood are basically protected by expert security team members continually looking across the neighbourhood ... for risks and threats that could be infiltrated by a form of threat actor,” he told attendees at a recent seminar.  

Mr Hart says CFC’s “neighbourhood watch” security includes using decades of claims data to help pre-empt and avoid incidents.

“We know which cyber events, which types of data, actually translate into a breach or an event occurring within the neighbourhood,” he said.

CFC’s international cyber team leader Philippa Davis told the seminar a minority of small businesses have cyber cover. Others tend to underestimate the risk and think they are too small to be targeted, which makes them “low-hanging fruit” to threat actors.  

She says 60% of SMEs that do not have cyber cover shut down within six months of suffering an incident.

In Australia, ransomware makes up only 14% of CFC cyber claims by frequency but represents 89% of incurred loss due to costs from business interruption, forensic work and extortion demands.