While dealing with interconnected and global risks, the cyber-insurance market is rapidly growing. This market is a creature of privacy and data security regulations, and mandatory breach notifications have shaped its business model. Market stakeholders suggest that cyber-insurance provides incentives and resources to insured organizations for improving cybersecurity. This presentation seeks to empirically test this claim, using academic and grey literature, official statistics and ethnographic interviews. First, it describes cyber-insurance in the US and Canada, showing that the market faces major obstacles. Second, it presents the benefits and limits of private insurance as a cybersecurity policy instrument. Keeping in mind the market’s lack of maturity, this presentation concludes that cyber-insurance generates massive uncertainties, risks increasing cyber-risks, and could even contribute to systemic risks.
About the speaker
Mathieu Charbonneau is postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University’s Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy (Montreal, Canada), and holds a joint PhD from Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada) and Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV, France). His researches focus, from an institutional economic sociology and public policy perspective, on climate change and the insurance industry, the cyber-insurance market, and prescription drug insurance and high-cost specialty drugs.
