Threat Management

Tech companies offer cyberinsurance guarantees

While cyberinsurance grabs headlines and news coverage, quietly behind the scenes, security companies are starting to offer financial guarantees to their products.

Jeremiah Grossman, chief of security strategy at Sentinel One, says security companies must do more to back up their products.

“People don't believe us anymore and the industry has to change,” Grossman says.

Grossman points to a recent Sentinel One survey which found that 95 percent of U.S. companies want to see their IT security vendors offer a guarantee on their products and services, and another 88 percent said they would change providers if they could find an alternate IT security vendor that offers a guarantee.

In response to consumer demand for guarantees, Sentinel One now offers refunds for customers hit by ransomware. They will pay $1,000 per endpoint up to a total limit of $1 million per customer.

“Our goal is to serve as a complement to cyberinsurance,” Grossman says, who adds that Sentinel One will pay for the event, but companies will still need cyberinsurance for the cost of downtime and any fines incurred.

Ori Eisen, CEO of Trusona, takes Sentinel One's concept a step further, by claiming that Trusana is the world's first security product to be backed by an insurance carrier.

Eisen would not name the carrier, but did say it is an A+ rated insurance carrier.

Trusona, which markets authentication software to large companies and government agencies, guarantees authentication on financial transactions such as wire transfers up to  $1 million per transaction.

“We can handle wire transfer up to $5 million, but the customer pays a higher premium,” he says.

Here's how it works: security managers can attach a uniquely-designed cryptographic hardware token that's also a card reader to a smartphone or any computing device. The chief financial officer or a person authorized to make large purchases then simply swipes a standard magstripe card through the card reader. Instead of focusing on the card's number, the device reads the molecular-level particles on the magstripe card.

“There's no way a counterfeiter can duplicate the molecular particles on a card,” Eisen explains. “So once you're registered with us, we guarantee that your transaction will be secure and the ‘true persona' behind it.”

Eisen claims that Trusona has handled more than 119 million transactions, pointing out that the number is that large because the core technology was used inside ATMs even before Trusona began using it for online authentication.

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