I had not heard about this case before. Zurich Insurance has refused to pay Mondelez International’s claim of $100 million in damages from NotPetya. It claims it is an act of war and therefor not covered. Mondelez is suing.

Those turning to cyber insurance to manage their exposure presently face significant uncertainties about its promise. First, the scope of cyber risks vastly exceeds available coverage, as cyber perils cut across most areas of commercial insurance in an unprecedented manner: direct losses to policyholders and third-party claims (clients, customers, etc.); financial, physical and IP damages; business interruption, and so on. Yet no cyber insurance policies cover this entire spectrum. Second, the scope of cyber-risk coverage under existing policies, whether traditional general liability or property policies or cyber-specific policies, is rarely comprehensive (to cover all possible cyber perils) and often unclear (i.e., it does not explicitly pertain to all manifestations of cyber perils, or it explicitly excludes some).

But it is in the public interest for Zurich and its peers to expand their role in managing cyber risk. In its ideal state, a mature cyber insurance market could go beyond simply absorbing some of the damage of cyberattacks and play a more fundamental role in engineering and managing cyber risk. It would allow analysis of data across industries to understand risk factors and develop common metrics and scalable solutions. It would allow researchers to pinpoint sources of aggregation risk, such as weak spots in widely relied-upon software and hardware platforms and services. Through its financial levers, the insurance industry can turn these insights into action, shaping private-sector behavior and promoting best practices internationally. Such systematic efforts to improve and incentivize cyber-risk management would redress the conditions that made NotPetya possible in the first place. This, in turn, would diminish the onus on governments to retaliate against attacks.