AXIS Systemic Cyber Threats Project

AXIS Capital is one of the major insurance carriers that provide cyber policies. As the world is becoming more connected than ever, systemic cyber threats pose a great risk to businesses that rely on information technology, as well as to insurers like AXIS, who provide financial protections to those businesses. As an example of systemic cyber threats, the outage of cloud services may simultaneously impact many policyholders, thus leading to a large number of claims that AXIS shall be responsible for. To improve insurers’ resilience against this risk, this project aims to explore and identify a suite of internal systemic cyber threat scenarios that together are broad enough to cover the entire threat landscape, but individually are specific enough to be used in practice on a stand-alone basis to support business decision making and risk understanding.
 

Furthermore, in this project, we will try to characterize each scenario for the inference of its occurrence likelihood and severity, and the results will be used to support setting capital and pricing loads, to challenge probabilistic risk modeling approaches, to monitor and manage exposure and risk trends, and may be used to set strategy.

Supervisors: Runhuan Feng, Zhiyu (Frank) Quan, Project Manager from AXIS Capital 

Graduate Supervisor: Linfeng Zhang