Insurance buyers want to purchase customised cyber threat coverage rather than an off-the-shelf product, a panellist told an international audience at the NetDiligence Cyber Risk Summit at Hamilton Princess & Beach Club.

Benjamin Vaughn, senior vice-president, chief information security officer of Hyatt Hotels, said: “What I have learnt so much from talking with all of you in this community is the variability of how organisations make use of insurance.

“What does the client want? I want to buy catastrophic coverage.

“I want to buy insurance based on the understanding that my organisation will do everything in our power to prevent bad things from happening to our guests.

“At the same time that we do that, three guys broke out of Alcatraz once. So anything that humans can make, other humans can unmake.

“We want to buy insurance for that.”

Mr Vaughn was sitting on the panel “Just Around the Corner: The Near Future Cyber Landscape”.

He was joined by lawyer Jennifer Beckage, of The Beckage Firm; broker Emma Norman, vice-president at Aon; and Travis Stevens, senior underwriter at Allied World.

The moderator was Noel Pearman, SVP, cyber product line leader at Axa XL.

Panellists discussed emerging technologies and their impact on the cyber threat landscape.

They said artificial intelligence is being employed by threat actors as well as being used by organisations seeking to protect against such threats.

Mr Vaughn said: “What we are seeing is increasing attempts to evade methods of detection as methods of detection themselves accelerate.

“There’s an application that is freely available on the Internet that uses very creative means to make any piece of malware look like the Windows calculator app.”

Ms Beckage said the use of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence by threat actors is “allowing them to be smarter and faster.

“Phishing e-mails that are based on AI technologies are more likely to have someone click.

“AI-enabled malware that can sit in high bunker and change and move ... so do our current detection tools help prevent against those?”

Ms Beckage said the full adoption of super-fast quantum computing will result in “larger, wide-scale attacks if the threat actors are using it”.

NetDiligence is a provider of cyber risk management software and services to the insurance industry.

The organisation publishes an annual cyber claims study and hosts annual cyber risk summits in Bermuda, Philadelphia, Santa Monica, Toronto, and London.