The New York State Department of Financial Services recently
issued guidance for New York-regulated property and casualty
insurers to effectively manage the cyber insurance risk present in
their insurance portfolio. The DFS' guidance signals an
effort to reduce overall volatility in the cyber insurance market,
which has been compounded by the recent proliferation of
cyberattacks and by insurers' widely varying approaches to
measuring each policyholder's cyber risk profile.
Although the DFS' Cyber Insurance Risk Framework applies
primarily to New York-regulated property and casualty insurers that
write cyber insurance, the framework cautions that insurers that do
not write cyber insurance nevertheless should evaluate their
potential exposure to “silent risk” in their non-cyber
insurance policies. Further, as the DFS has taken the lead in
recent years among insurance regulators on cybersecurity issues,
the framework provides valuable guidance to insurers that
