Willis Towers Watson has introduced two new cyber risk assessment services in response to the findings from its recent cyber claims insight report.

The report found that human error was the single biggest root-cause of global cyber incidents and claims, and that ransomware – and its subsequent business interruption – is the most significant risk when considering direct financial costs to businesses.

The Workforce Cyber Culture Assessment is a cyber risk methodology specifically designed to assess people risk and the impact of business culture in a cyber context. It is intended to highlight any perceived ‘high risk’ attitudes and behaviours within the workforce to cyber risk, such as current working environment and workplace pressures and assesses the key factors affecting the likelihood and impact of people-related cyber security incidents.

The Ransomware Risk Assessment is a custom assessment framework, available for both information technology and operational technology environments, that focuses on what is amongst the most severe of cyber threats facing organisations globally. The assessment moves beyond just technology controls and observes the entirety of a client’s ransomware threat surface across several key risk areas. The assessment is designed to provide clients with a tailored snapshot of their ransomware risk position, as well as offering a practical improvement plan designed to assist with identifying security gaps, exposures or vulnerabilities.

Dean Chapman, lead cyber risk consultant at Willis Towers Watson, said: “The business impacts associated with people-related security incidents and ransomware attacks are well documented, and both have the potential to be catastrophic from a number of organisational standpoints, including operational, financial and reputational impacts. Whilst the two are intrinsically linked, for example a ransomware attack is often initiated via a breach of the ‘human’, they require slightly different approaches to risk identification, assessment and management.

“Targeting humans is quicker, easier and comes with much higher success rates – cyber criminals only need to get lucky once. For this reason, we have developed these services to assist our clients in focusing their security efforts on addressing two of the most critical cyber risks to businesses today.”

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