High Cyber Insurance Premium? It Might Be Their Risk

Black Hat USA 2025 insight: a sky-high cyber insurance premium doesn’t always reflect your security posture. Sometimes it signals your insurer’s own risk limits—especially around vendors in your supply chain.

Why your quote can spike

• Vendor concentration caps: Insurers may limit how many customers can use a specific product or provider. If you push them over that threshold, they might price themselves out rather than decline you.
• It’s about portfolio exposure: The risk may sit with a supplier, not your environment—sometimes without any specific active vulnerability, just an internal limit reached.
• Real-world parallel: Car insurance quotes can vary by 200% even when your personal risk is unchanged, due to insurers capping exposure to certain manufacturers.

Claims data that changes priorities

• 45% of new cyber claims in H1 2025 stemmed from SSL VPNs without MFA—an avoidable, high-impact gap.
• 55% of ransomware starts via perimeter security devices; when methods are known, credential theft leads the way.

Money clawback is possible

• In 2024, Coalition recovered $31 million from fraudulent transfers.
• Average recovery per event: $278,000; 24% of incidents saw some recovery and 12% recovered the full amount.

How insurers are getting proactive

• Tailored threat intelligence aligned to your stack and attack surface.
• CVE monitoring mapped to your known assets, plus guidance on patch timelines.
• Dark web interventions: purchasing compromised credentials and, in some cases, acquiring zero-day vulnerabilities to protect insureds and reduce loss exposure.

What to do now

• Enforce MFA everywhere—especially on SSL VPNs and any remote access pathways.
• Minimize exposed perimeter services, harden edge devices, and patch on a risk-based schedule.
• Ask brokers/insurers about vendor exposure caps and how they influence your premium.
• Use included insurer services (threat intel, CVE alerts, crisis response) to shrink both risk and cost.
• Confirm wire-fraud response playbooks, clawback processes, and escalation contacts.
• Keep accurate asset and vendor inventories so alerts map to real systems fast.

As cyber insurance and cybersecurity continue to converge, expect deeper overlap. The organizations that pair foundational controls (like MFA) with insurer-provided intelligence will cut both incident likelihood and premium volatility.

Source: WeLiveSecurity