Asia's cyber insurance market set to triple by 2025

Cost of cybercrime is projected to increase to nearly $24t by 2027.

Asia's cyber insurance market, is projected to triple by 2025, as businesses strive to bolster cybersecurity and ensure operational resilience, revealed Zurich Insurance Group and Marsh McLennan in a recently published whitepaper.

The paper, “Closing the Cyber Risk Protection Gap”, identified s a significant gap in cyber risk protection, especially for small and medium-sized businesses that are often uninsured or underinsured. 

Key cyber incidents, such as mass malware, cloud outages, and critical infrastructure failures, pose challenges to the insurance industry, which can only cover financial losses up to certain levels. 

In the Asia Pacific region, where rapid digitalisation has heightened vulnerability, cyberattacks accounted for 23% of global incidents in 2023. 

“The global cost of cybercrime is projected to increase to nearly $24t by 2027, up from close to $8.5t in 2022. And this does not include the cost of non-malicious events, such as witnessed in the recent CrowdStrike outage,” the paper said.

Debra Burford, chief underwriting officer for Zurich Insurance in APAC, pointed to the region's heightened exposure to cyber threats, underscoring the need for collaboration between the private and public sectors to strengthen resilience. This sentiment was echoed by Mario Greco, group CEO of Zurich Insurance, and John Doyle, president & CEO of Marsh McLennan, who both called for collective action to bridge the protection gap.

The whitepaper further proposed the establishment of a common framework for data sharing and cooperation between insurers and the public sector. 

This would include incentives for innovation, strategies to handle unquantifiable risks, and methods to measure catastrophic cyber risks. Such measures aim to ensure societal resilience and mitigate the substantial financial risks posed by large-scale cyber events.