Insurance Companies Struggle With The Virus Question
from the what-to-do,-what-to-do dept
In California, it’s pretty difficult to get covered by earthquake insurance, because events like earthquakes ruin the basic mathematics of how insurance works. That is, if an earthquake happened, everyone would make insurance claims at once. Insurance companies work by spreading the risk across a large enough population that should a claimable event occur, enough people aren’t impacted to pay for those that were. However, when it comes to computer security, a situation like a virus is becoming even more difficult to insure than an earthquake. At least an earthquake is limited to a specific geographical region. In the case of a computer virus that can spread around the globe pretty quickly, knocking out all kinds of machines, it’s pretty damn difficult to “spread the risk” and many insurance companies just don’t bother.
Comments on “Insurance Companies Struggle With The Virus Question”
Meta-insurance
Actually, there is a well-established system of insurance companies that serve other insurance companies when major disasters strike. The real reason that California earthquake insurance is scarce is because of the inflated real estate prices here. Hurricanes happen far more regularly and cause far more damage. Ditto for software insurance, the true value of data is difficult to measure and probably inflated.
Just like the 25-year-old smoker with 3 the suspe
Hmm. Wonder if certain OSes or behaviour will cause different rates.
Yeah, you use Windows, have 1 teen child on MSN and use Outlook. Your premium is now 60 times my linux/jabber/evolution lovin’ self.
Re: Just like the 25-year-old smoker with 3 the s
It’s pretty hard to fake an earthquake, tornado or hurricane.
Modern day science has made it pretty difficult to get away with arson.
What modern detective tools do we have to determine that the ‘virus’ that caused ‘roughly one hundred zillion dollars’ of damage to a company that was already in rough financial shape wasn’t written/distributed by them?
All you have to do is thrown in a few comment lines in the VB Script that say “Written by the V-Master, Hong Kong, China” or “Greets go out to my fellow Filipinos from the Lord of Viral Destruction!” and voila, you can blame it on someone else.