Page 49 - Cyber Defense eMagazine September 2025

This external assessment uses DNS enumeration, IP range scans, and breach data correlation. For
example, if you have forgotten subdomains pointing to unmaintained servers or left a test S3 bucket open
to the public, it impacts underwriting. That alone can drive up your premium or reduce your coverage
cap.

2. Policy Enforcement Must be Measurable and Machine-Verifiable

Insurers aren't just asking whether you have controls in place. They are beginning to request logs or
reports that prove controls are working. For example, insurers expect MFA enforcement at the identity
provider level, role-based access control to be applied and audited, endpoint agents reporting in, and
segmentation policies at the network layer.

If you're running infrastructure as code, you need enforcement around that code; simply writing a policy
isn't enough. Your configuration management system should alert on drift. Your identity system should
raise events when new users are provisioned with elevated privileges. Additionally, you should be able
to prove when a misconfiguration was introduced and when it was remediated.

3. Claims Adjusters Rely on Forensic Timelines - You Need Complete and Trusted Logs

When a breach occurs, most organizations enter recovery mode. Yet, insurers go into investigation mode.
They will want to know the exact timeline of events, including the initial compromise, lateral movement,
persistence techniques, and exfiltration or damage.

That timeline needs to be built from actual logs. If your endpoint logs only store seven days of data, or
your SIEM misses certain systems due to licensing constraints, you've already lost context. If cloud audit
logs are disabled or not routed to a central location, this issue creates gaps.

4. Ransomware Response Needs to be Automated and Recoverable

Insurers are shifting away from blindly covering ransom payments. They want evidence that you had a
response plan, that backups were maintained securely, and that your systems had resilience
mechanisms in place. For example, insurers could zoom in on segmentation to isolate affected networks,
immutable backups stored out-of-band, and the ability to detect encryption events in progress.

Your claim may be weakened if you lack runtime monitoring capable of flagging mass file changes,
encryption behaviors, or beaconing activity. The same applies to backup systems accessible over the
same network and sharing the same authentication plane as the compromised systems.

Cyber Defense eMagazine – September 2025 Edition 49
Copyright © 2025, Cyber Defense Magazine. All rights reserved worldwide.