Catastrophe modelling firm AIR Worldwide has released an "open source" deterministic cyber risk scenario that gauges losses in the event of a major cloud service provider going down for several days.
An offline cloud provider could result in severe business interruption losses for insureds and is one of a number of cyber catastrophes postulated by the industry.
The scenario is open source, allowing users to tweak the assumptions according to their view and generate estimates of potential losses from an insurance book.
AIR, a Verisk Analytics company, plans to release a series of deterministic cyber scenarios over the next 12 months. Consulting clients will gain early access to future scenarios.
Scott Stransky, assistant vice-president and principal scientist, AIR Worldwide, said: "These open source deterministic cyber scenarios will supplement the number and variety of cyber scenarios that companies are currently managing, allowing the insurance industry to begin to truly understand their aggregated risk from large-scale cyber attacks that could lead to catastrophic accumulated losses."
AIR released a data schema earlier this year to help standardise data collection and is developing a probabilistic cyber model (IERM, 19 January, Verisk polls 50 firms to develop cyber risk exposure data standard).