Bryce Webster-Jacobsen, Director of Intelligence Operations at digital risk protection / ransomware negotiators GroupSense, was a featured on SC Media. Bryce spoke to Joe Uchill about the cyber insurance bubble bursting and how organizations need to take a different approach.
Since the start of the pandemic, the FBI has seen a 400% increase in ransomware attacks. In addition, the average ransomware payment increased 82% since 2020. Especially with the holidays around the corner, it isn't surprising to hear of a ransomware attack on the news.
For many organizations with cyber insurance, they might think that they are covered. However according to the SC Media article, "At a time when the need for cyber insurance has never been more clear, brokerages have spent much of 2021 decreasing coverage and increasing rates. But on Friday, tucked into a Reuters story, a big shoe appeared to drop: Lloyds of London, the carrier holding nearly a fifth of the cyber insurance market, discouraged its syndicate from taking cyber business in 2022."
Bryce Webster-Jacobsen weighed in. Here are a few of our favorite highlights from the article, "As the cyber insurance bubble begins to burst, the market scrambles for a new approach."
"We find that with victims that don't have insurance, conversations are much more difficult. Budgets become much more constrained. There's often a heightened sense of pressure on negotiating the figure down to fundamentals that allows victim to recover, and sometimes you're not able to bridge that gap between the victim and the threat actor," said Bryce Webster-Jacobsen, director of intelligence operations at Groupsense, a cyber intelligence firm with a well-known ransomware negotiation practice.
"Without insurance, a company has to figure out how they're covering not just the actual ransom itself, but all of the expenses related to recovery and investigations and the incident response," said Webster-Jacobsen.
Those expenses could include lawyer fees covering a hefty breach negotiation contract, business losses from downtime and public relations costs, in addition to the technical costs of investigating and restoring the network. All of these costs, said Webster-Jacobsen, need to be part of disaster planning.
Bryce is the Director of Intelligence Operations at GroupSense, a leading provider in Digital Risk solutions. Bryce leads the day-to-day intelligence activities of GroupSense's Analyst and Research teams producing finished, tailored intelligence for our diverse clients.
Prior to GroupSense, Bryce worked in strategic international education initiatives while pursuing OSINT training and investigations, primarily focused on studying extremist movements, as a passion project.