Global insured losses from last week’s CrowdStrike outage could sit somewhere between £310m and £1.2bn for the standalone cyber insurance market, according to data from CyberCube. The faulty CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor update and subsequent outage would represent a loss ratio impact of roughly 3-10% on global cyber premiums of £12bn today.

This scale of loss could make the event the largest single insured loss event in the history of the affirmative cyber insurance industry over the past 20 years. At the same time, an event of this scale does not come close to the extreme scenarios currently being modelled by cyber insurers and reinsurers.

Each insurance carrier’s claims experience depends on some pivotal criteria relating to the characteristics of their specific portfolio including coverage for non-malicious system failure, contingent business interruption and the makeup of insureds in that portfolio. Carriers are anticipated to see disproportionate losses in portfolios that have significant large corporate exposures.

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