World of Hell. Red October. WannaCry. Petya.
These are of the names of just some of the cyberattacks that have rocked the world over the last several years. Each one represents a story of lost money, disrupted business, compromised information and shattered trust.
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And the headlines keep on coming.
In a recent example, Henry Schein (HSIC) -) said that on Oct. 13 it had determined that a portion of its manufacturing and distribution businesses “experienced a cybersecurity incident.”
U.S., China, Japan at biggest risk
The healthcare products and services company said it promptly took precautionary action, including taking certain systems offline and other steps intended to contain the incident, which led to temporary disruption of some of its business operations.
The internet may have brought people together but unfortunately there are some very nasty characters lurking out there in the dark web.
The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center received 800,944 complaints last year, down 5% from the previous year, but the potential total loss grew from $6.9 billion in 2021 to more than $10.2 billion in 2022.
Those numbers may sound shocking, but they pale in comparison to a report from Lloyd's of London that warned a major cyber attack on a financial services payments system could lead to global losses of $3.5 trillion.
The U.S. would suffer losses of $1.1 trillion over a five-year period from such an attack, which would cause widespread disruption to global business, according to a systemic risk scenario developed by Lloyd's and the Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies.
China would face $470 billion in losses and Japan $200 billion over the same period, the British insurance and reinsurance market said.
Cyber risks affects all areas of society
The recovery time for individual countries or regions depends on the structure of their economy, exposure levels and resilience.
"The global interconnectedness of cyber means it is too substantial a risk for one sector to face alone and therefore we must continue to share knowledge, expertise and innovative ideas across government, industry and the insurance market to ensure we build society’s resilience against the potential scale of this risk," Bruce Carnegie-Brown, Lloyd’s chairman, said in an Oct. 18 statement.
Lloyd's said cyber attacks continue to threaten businesses and governments, with year-on-year costs around maintenance, prevention, and response to attacks increasing.
Cyber remains a risk that has the potential to affect all areas of society, Lloyd's said, "as it is both a complex and connected risk impacting areas such as supply chains and geopolitics."
Cyber insurance is a growing market, estimated at just over $9 billion in gross written premiums last year, and forecast to hit between $13 billion and $25 billion by 2025.
However, Lloyd’s said, this still represents a small portion of the potential economic losses that businesses and society face.
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