Given the accelerating pace of ransomware and other cyberattacks—as well as the financial losses they can cause—it’s no surprise that business demand for cyber insurance is rising just as quickly.
However, some companies are finding it much easier than others to secure affordable and effective coverage, according to Dan Candee, CEO of Cork Protection.
“I see significant effort by the carriers to offer better coverage and response times, but the primary recipients of these improvements are the larger organizations,” Candee told MSSP Alert. “At Cork, we are 100% focused on protecting Main Street, because we believe it is the universal right for all businesses to survive cybersecurity attacks.”
The Boston-based startup offers its
Cork Risk Monitoring Platform to MSPs and MSSPs looking to secure cyber insurance for their clients. The AI-powered platform includes real-time threat intelligence, adaptive premium options, and an embedded warranty that MSPs can use to find the right policy for their SMB customers.
'Easy Button for MSPs and MSSPs'
Cork, which was founded in 2023, is adding another tool to the platform this week: the
Cyber Insurance Policy Analyzer, which includes a proprietary AI agent to scan and interpret the dense language that make up policies, highlight missing or unclear coverage areas, and illustrates how the company’s cyber warranty can reduce the risk to a MSP’s customer.
The vendor says it takes less than two minutes for the analyzer to pore through policies to create a summary that can help MSPs and MSSPs find effective and cost-efficient coverage for clients.
“We have created the easy button for MSPs and MSSPs to support their clients' questions about cyber insurance, questionnaires, and policy pricing,” Candee said. “Literally, it’s a button in the platform and they can drag-and-drop any client policy to be analyzed. What used to take hours or days is now done in about a minute, and the best part is that it's all free.”
He added that the tool “takes many pages of complex cyber insurance policies, condenses them into a one-pager ready to be downloaded and handed to the end-customer, including an executive summary, coverage summary, risk summary, and an explanation of if [and] where a Cork warranty can supplement the cyber insurance coverage.”
Cork’s Cyber Insurance Policy Analyzer is available to its partners and early access users.
An Evolving Insurance Landscape
This comes at a time when cyber insurance is increasingly in demand, driven not only by the growing number and sophistication of the attacks but also by the expanding use of AI by threat actors and the amount of money – often in the millions of dollars – that can be lost during a data breach.
A Comparitech research highlights the average payment demanded in a ransomware attack in 2024 year was
more than $3 million, with the average ransom paid reaching more than $9.5 million. The global cyber insurance market itself is growing rapidly, with Fortune Business Insights analysts predicting it to grow from $20.88 billion last year to
$120.47 billion by 2032.
Others in the industry also are trying to make it easier for organizations of all sizes to acquire policies. Cybersecurity platform provider Todyl recently announced it was partnering with Spectra – which has a cyber insurance and risk management platform – to create a program for MSPs and MSSPs for
simplifying the certification process and ease coverage access for clients. It is based on Spectra’s three-step process.
Complex Processes
Candee recognizes the complexities involved in navigating the often convoluted cyber insurance landscape.
“Our clients and partners know the notorious offenders well – the insane questionnaires, high-prices for poor coverage, lack of faith in payouts, timeliness in payouts,” the CEO said, adding that Austin McChord – a Cork co-founder and the founder of data backup firm Datto, which is now part of Kaseya – is equally driven by a desire to address such problems. “For example, one of our SLAs ... is to deliver a $10,000 electronic credit card to the MSP within 30 minutes of a claim. Another is to reimburse the partner for incident response expenses within two weeks. Recently, I even paid for an MSP’s pizza bill.”
Cork’s insight solution integrates with MSPs’ existing tech environment via agentless APIs to create an underwriting model that has 74 integrations covering 93% of security vendors across eight segments, from remote monitoring and management (RMM) to endpoint detection and response (EDR).
“It's like injecting the dye into the bloodstream to gain 100% visibility and accuracy of threats,” he said. “We see exactly what happens during a cyberattack, what cybersecurity solutions were activated and their efficacy, and can use all that data to influence cyber insurance outcomes,” Cork adds.
Help for MSSPs and MSPs
Cork’s warranty enables the MSPs and MSSP to support their clients through the remediation process. All of this is important given the role MSPs play in helping clients get cyber insurance.
“We are learning together, and the better my team and I listen, the faster we help MSPs succeed,” Candee said. “We know its evolving racecar speed and demands a new synergy between MSPs and MSSPs and their clients. We believe this relationship takes some love and performance – clients navigating cyber risk and insurance, and MSPs guiding them toward robust security and informed decisions. A unified source of truth for risk and compliance is foundational.”
