CyberFortress Insurance Services US
Financial Resilience against Data Breaches

Cyber insurance and financial resilience go hand-in-hand and the absence of the former has had devastating consequences for the financial health of small and medium enterprises, particularly ecommerce companies. In fact, cyber attacks have time and again proven to disrupt cash flows for businesses, causing reputational damage and financial losses.

Witnessing these setbacks led Huw Edwards to lay the cornerstone for CyberFortress Insurance Service US (CyberFortress) to assist ecommerce companies with financial protection against cyber attacks and service provider failures. In an interview with CIO Applications, Edwards, the CEO of CyberFortress, shares his insights on the firm’s capabilities and the solutions it offers for cyber readiness by harnessing the power of new technologies.

Could you help us understand how CyberFortress is implementing AI and data analytics to device financial products?

Cybersecurity tools are important, but a financial instrument is an essential part of any cybersecurity program. As cyberattacks increase and the world becomes ever-more interconnected, cyber insurance is an increasingly necessary part of surviving a cyberattack or service provider failure.

CyberFortress, in tandem with our domain expertise in cybersecurity, utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) to craft products that safeguard ecommerce companies against cyberattacks, service provider failures, and other cyber incidents that disrupt business operations. Unlike traditional cybersecurity insurance that includes complicated applications and a drawn out claims process, CyberFortress will be launching an insurance product that is parametric in nature. We continuously monitor hundreds of thousands of ecommerce websites which enables us to assess whether they are suffering downtime thereby eliminating the need for further audits. This will allow CyberFortress to promptly deliver payments for clients within 24 hours of a claim being submitted.

What approach does CyberFortress take to onboard its clients while delivering its solutions?

Users can sign up with their business email address to use our free Risk Assessment product. From just an address we analyze thousands of technology features and how they have changed throughout time. The collected data is then fed into our machine learning (ML) models to quantify the user’s risk. Along with the Risk Assessment, we also provide feedback highlighting crucial contributory factors such as SSL, hosting services, content delivery network, MX, and several other elements that affect the assessments. Such an approach gives users a holistic, technology-based view of their security posture as it pertains to downtime risk.

What according to you are some of the factors that differentiate CyberFortress from other emerging players in the market?

Insurance providers mostly rely on the opinions of people to decide the best technology choices when underwriting a policy. However, those views can be biased and inaccurate, resulting in ineffectual financial protection against cyber incidents. At CyberFortress, we employ internet-scale data collection to collect thousands of data points from hundreds of thousands of websites and feed those into our machine learning models. We are also continuously gathering this information which enables our algorithms and ML models to constantly learn and improve their accuracy in forecasting possible outcomes. This enhances our understanding of the variables that correlate to security risks and downtime of websites. Such methodologies enable us to find the probability and severity of events that may lead to revenue loss for companies and by leveraging such insights from historical data, we price our insurance policy accordingly.

What does the future hold for CyberFortress?

We are planning to roll out data-driven cyber insurance policies toward the second half of 2019. Beginning with Texas, we will introduce our offerings in the states with the most substantial concentration of e-commerce companies. However, we will further expand our footprint to cover all 50 states over time and eventually explore opportunities outside the United States of America. In addition, we are actively discussing our business with investors to raise funds for business growth. We are also preparing to expand our workforce with a talented pool of experts for developing innovative products. We are committed to enhancing our portfolio of cyber insurance products to help solve the critical needs of ecommerce companies and reduce the damage caused by cyber breaches.