Advisen Loss Insight: Cyber by the sector

When evaluating the number of cyber events that have occurred across all industries, the “services” sector typically ends up taking the top spot, accounting for 47 percent of all reported cyber incidents, according to the most recent Advisen data. The financial, insurance, and real estate sector offers a distant second, at 18 percent of all incidents. The difference between the most commonly affected sector and the second-most commonly affected can be attributed to the wide variety of different types of businesses that fall into the category of “services.” As Advisen data show, this category includes some of the most frequently targeted industries — healthcare and educational institutions.

However, when we take a look at the average number of incidents in any given sector, public administration rises in the ranks of event frequency. Cyber events strike public administration entities at a far greater rate than other industries, perhaps due to fewer organizations that fall into this category, compared to the larger services and financial sectors.

The above graph illustrates exactly how wide-ranging the services sector actually is. The overall high number of incidents becomes clearer when we see that “services” can be broken down into educational institutions, health services, and the frequently targeted hotel industry, among others. This week offered two examples of the events that strike this sector, as Rutgers University reportedly suffered another cyber attack — the fifth this year — and Trump Hotels confirmed that malware present on the hotels’ systems could have exposed customer data for more than a year.

The chances that cyber events will cause financial loss for any industry remains high. While healthcare and education experience events more frequently, their loss probability either compares to or is lower than other industries. As educational institutions tend to be the target of distributed denial of service attacks, or efforts to steal intellectual property or research, the loss probability becomes harder to calculate. In the case of healthcare, odds are that losses will be lower than in other industries, according to Advisen data — except in the case of the less likely events, the one-in-100-year data breach storm, for example. Given that the data also indicates that the services category’s probability of loss generally outstrips all other industries, at any level of loss, it appears that other industries within the sector — motion pictures, hotels, or business services, for instance — also carry higher probability of loss.