6 September 2024

Zurich Resilience Solutions (ZRS) today announced the appointment of Dan Elliott to the newly created position of Head of Cyber Resilience.

Mr Elliott will lead a new and dedicated cyber function within ZRS, which will specialise in providing cyber risk intelligence and advisory services to businesses across Australia.

ZRS provides specialised insights and tools – beyond insurance – to help companies across a wide range of industries manage traditional and evolving risks and build resilience. Services are provided across several domains, including: climate change resilience; supply chain risk; and cyber security.

Mr Elliott joins from ZRS Canada, where he held the role of Principal, Cyber Security Risk Advisory. Prior to this, he has held several roles spanning cyber security, intelligence and risk, including as an Intelligence Officer with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).

Mr Elliott said, “I am delighted to lead and continue bolstering the ZRS Cyber Resilience unit in Australia.”

“As the threat and sophistication of cyber risk continues to rise, it is critical that businesses are equipped with the tools and knowledge required to navigate and build resilience in this complex environment,” Mr Elliott said.

The appointment coincides with the release of a report this week by Zurich outlining the fundamental importance of building cyber resilience to ensure the global economy can resist, withstand, and recover quickly from incidents.

The report, Closing the cyber risk protection gap, suggests that the insurance industry and public sector implement a framework for cyber resilience which includes:

• robust incentives as an alternative to further regulation;
• methods to measure quantifiable catastrophic cyber risk; and
• strategies to manage unquantifiable cyber risk through public-private partnerships.

It also states resilience is also necessary for the insurance industry to better support society against the backdrop of severe financial accumulation risks.

As dependence on digital technology deepens, cyber risks are an ever-growing concern for societies around the globe. 

According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2024, produced in collaboration with Zurich, nearly 40 per cent of experts surveyed consider cyberattacks to be a paramount risk with the potential to trigger a material crisis in the near future, placing cyberattacks within the top five in the report’s current risk landscape.

The global cost of cybercrime is projected to increase to nearly USD24 trillion by 2027, up from USD8.5 trillion in 2022, and this does not include the cost of non-malicious events, such as witnessed in the recent CrowdStrike outage.

The full report can be found online here.

-ENDS-