Cyber insurance is a fast-growing market, and rightly so, given how cybercrime rages on. For this article, we gathered key statistics about cyber insurance to help you understand just how big of a market it is and what drives companies and individuals to get this type of insurance.

Cyber Insurance Statistics

Cyber insurance statistics cover a wide set of data about market size, claims, cybercrimes, and more, but let’s start with a general overview of the cyber insurance market.

Market Size and Predictions

Cyber insurance is already a big market, but it might grow even bigger in the future. Here’s what we know about the size of the cyber insurance industry so far:

 

• Market size: According to the latest available data, the global cyber insurance market was worth $7.8 billion in 2020.

• Future growth: Forecasts suggest that cyber insurance will grow into a $20 billion industry by 2025.

• Distribution: Business cyber insurance dominates the market. In 2018, 75 percent of cyber insurance premiums in the United States were for businesses. Only the remaining 25 percent, worth $500 million, were for individuals.1

 

Cybercrime by the Numbers

 

One of the main drivers of the cyber insurance market growth is the rise in the number and severity of cybercrimes. Here are some of the most noteworthy statistics we’ve gathered about cybercrime:

• Ransomware is common (and often lucrative). In 2020, 1 in 6 businesses that fell victim to cyberattacks faced ransomware, and about half of them paid up the ransom.2

• Cybercrime reports nearly doubled. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) saw a 69 percent increase in the number of cybercrime reports it received in 2020 compared to 2019. On average, the FBI received 2,000 cybercrime reports per day in 2020.3

• Data breaches affect personal data. In 2020 alone, data breaches exposed over 37 billion personal records, 82 percent of which came from only five breaches.4 Data breaches affect not only companies and organizations, but also the people whose information is in the exposed records.

• Identity fraud causes serious losses. Identity fraud losses in 2020 cost its 49 million victims $56 billion in total. That breaks down to $1,100 per victim.5

• Cyber attacks are the most common: For those that are slightly to somewhat familiar with cyber insurance, 70 percent have experienced a cyber attack, followed by identity theft at 69 percent, cyberbullying at 64 percent, and cyber extortion at 69 percent.

 

Did You Know: Personal cyber insurance doesn’t only cover fraud, malware, and cyberscams, but also cyberbullying. Some cyber insurance companies reimburse policyholders for income loss or private tutoring costs resulting from cyberbullying.
 

Cyber Insurance and the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic also contributed to the fast growth of the cyber insurance market. The pandemic accelerated the digitalization of business operations, as it forced businesses to adopt work-from-home setups. Unfortunately, the abrupt implementation of these setups created a larger surface area for cyberattackers to exploit. These numbers from the FBI IC3 show the difference between the number of cybercrime reports it received pre-pandemic in 2019 and during the pandemic in

2020.