Incentives, Insurance and Root Cause
Over the decade or so since The New School book came out, there’s been a sea change in how we talk about breaches, and how we talk about those who got breached. We agree that understanding what’s going wrong should be a bigger part of how we learn. I’m pleased to have played some part in that movement.
As I consider where we are today, a question that we can’t answer sufficiently is “what’s in it for me?” “Why should I spend time on this?” The benefits may take too long to appear. And so we should ask what we could do about that. In that context, I am very excited to see a proposal from Rob Knake on “Creating a Federally Sponsored Cyber Insurance Program.”
He suggests that a full root cause analysis would be a condition of Federal insurance backstop:
The federally backstopped cyber insurance program should mandate that companies allow full breach investigations, which include on-site gathering of data on why the attack succeeded, to help other companies prevent similar attacks. This function would be similar to that performed by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) for aviation incidents. When an incident occurs, the NTSB establishes the facts of the incident and makes recommendations to prevent similar incidents from occurring. Although regulators typically establish new requirements upon the basis of NTSB recommendations, most air carriers implement recommendations on a voluntary basis. Such a virtuous cycle could happen in cybersecurity if companies covered by a federal cyber insurance program had their incidents investigated by a new NTSB-like entity, which could be run by the private sector and funded by insurance companies.