Cyber Insurance gets Boost as Coalition buy BinaryEdge
Until now, the cyber insurance market has been held back by what seems to be a constantly evolving threat. But as cybercrime grows, insurers are developing more sophisticated ways to model the risks.
In a deal that could help drive this small market forward, Coalition, a cyber-insurance provider for small and midsize businesses, has acquired threat intelligence service BinaryEdge. The deal completed in October 2019 and was announced last week.
BinaryEdge offers Coalition an internet scanning technology that can map the attack surface of its enterprise customers, monitor risk exposures, and get an objective picture of cybersecurity levels. Premiums can then be adjusted appropriately, and vulnerabilities fixed proactively.
“The addition of BinaryEdge technology to the Coalition platform will give Coalition’s policyholders the ability to find, investigate, and monitor their assets, and is included at no cost for every Coalition policyholder.” said BinaryEdge CEO Tiago Henriques in a blog post. “These new capabilities will allow for a continuous improvement of policyholders’ security by providing them with security insights of their internet exposed assets.”
Along with integrating the vulnerability scanning features into its own offering, Coalition will keep BinaryEdge running as a stand-alone service, and scale it with the addition of more staff.
Though the cyber insurance market is still in its infancy, analysts agree it has strong growth prospects – fed by an ever increasing number of cyber-attacks, the advent of data protection legislation like GDPR, and the development of scanning technology like BinaryEdge’s that allows insurers to better assess risk.
These factors, along with rising awareness of cybersecurity risk among enterprises, are likely to boost demand for cyber insurers and create a dynamic mergers and acquisitions market in the coming years.
