The murmuration of the starlings - AXIS 35 views of cyber risk

The murmuration of the starlings35 views of cyber risk | Part 2 October 2022In a time of deep uncertainty, brought on by seismic political and economic shifts and the deteriorating environmental outlook, the inner battle...Contents

Foreword

In a time of deep uncertainty, brought on by seismic political and economic shifts and the deteriorating environmental outlook, the inner battle between sliding into deep apathy and the urge to find meaning in the seemingly nonsensical becomes even stronger. It is the latter that has to triumph, as it is through making sense of the world around us that enables us to learn, thrive, and, in the end, make progress. For through learning there is the chance to find understanding and in understanding, the chance to find opportunity.

Struggles of the last few years, particularly those stemming from the pandemic and its aftershocks, have led communities, especially in wealthier, developed countries, to learn to live with a heightened sense of unpredictability. Yet it is still essential to build resilience and to develop mechanisms to manage risk, and in doing so support self-preservation. The ability to do so again comes through striving to understand.

The worst pandemic in decades, Covid-19 introduced many of us to a whole new set of data, lexicon, and experts from the worlds of life sciences and medicine that we had never come into contact with before in our attempts to comprehend the situation.

It was those experts that were able to calmly distil complex ideas and emerging research into the virus into digestible, relatable language for press calls that we tuned into, thereby becoming overnight celebrities. What we learned, however, was that there was not one single solution to the issues the world faced and that it would take a myriad of approaches, insights, and individuals to deliver vaccines, wider healthcare, and support to the global community.

Amid seemingly accelerated and complex change, there is not always a precedent or, in insurance, a model or algorithm to turn to make sense of the present or to predict the future. This is especially true in cyber risk, which, though data-rich, is still a relatively young risk category. A constant game of cat and mouse between those bad actors—the predators—seeking to disrupt, defraud, or destroy and their prey means the threat must constantly evolve; what the data told us and what we thought we knew about cyber risk in 2019 is not what we see today, though we continue to believe an approach based on learning and, through learning, understanding is the way forward.

It is in this climate that my esteemed colleague John Donald has revisited 35 Views of cyber risk, which he wrote and first published in 2019. What was true then is arguably even more true now, which is that we only improve our understanding and combinative thinking by looking beyond the usual parameters to diverse thinking and new ideas and perspectives.

In this edition, John revisits and reworks some of those earlier perspectives and combines them with new content that leans on ideas and science based in the natural world he crafts into analogies that seek to demystify and explain cyber risk in its many forms. This time the metaphor of the murmuration of starlings gives its name to the book. Here, John extends the idea of taking multiple viewpoints to the complex relationship between the individual and the group. This dynamic, and the opposing forces it creates, remains fundamental to our understanding of cyber risk. We thank John for his inspirational ideas and commitment to bringing deeper understanding and clarity to the shifting cyber risk landscape and its interconnectedness with the world around us.