CrowdStrike losses may be biggest test yet of cybersecurity insurance risk warning from Warren Buffett
At Berkshire Hathaway’s annual investor meeting earlier this year, Warren Buffett and his top insurance executive Ajit Jain issued a headline-grabbing warning that Berkshire would exercise caution regarding cyber insurance — in fact, it advised insurance agents to only sell cyber policies if they absolutely had to do so to satisfy a client, and to expect losses.
At Berkshire Hathaway’s annual investor meeting earlier this year, Warren Buffett and his top insurance executive Ajit Jain issued a headline-grabbing warning that Berkshire would exercise caution regarding cyber insurance — in fact, it advised insurance agents to only sell cyber policies if they absolutely had to do so to satisfy a client, and to expect losses.
A primary reason cited is the difficulty in assessing the scale of losses possible from a single occurrence that spreads across technology systems, with Jain giving the hypothetical example of when a primary cloud provider’s platform “comes to a standstill.”
“That aggregation potential can be huge, and not being able to have a worst-case gap on it is what scares us,” he said.
Jain’s hypothetical seemed prescient when a quality control issue from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike caused a worldwide IT outage that halted flights and freight, shuttered retail outlets, and caused hospitals to resort to charting on paper.
“Insurers have been worried about something like what happened with CrowdStrike since cloud adoption happened,” said Dale Gonzales, chief innovation officer at Axio, a cyber security risk analysis company.
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