Page 50 - Cyber Defense eMagazine September 2025

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5. Your Cloud Configuration Posture is an Underwriting Risk

Cloud environments evolve fast. Most insurance policies assume that you can keep up with that speed
without exposing data or creating escalation paths. If your developers have IAM roles with wildcard
permissions or if your default VPCs allow inbound SSH connections, those are surfaced during an
incident.

You need real-time config scanning that maps changes to defined baselines. Strategies include marking
cloud storage private by default, streaming audit logs centrally, and scoping workload identities to the
minimum required privileges.

6. Third-Party Access is Your Liability, Not Theirs

If your vendor is compromised and that compromise leads to data loss, the insurance claim lands on your
desk. Your ability to isolate and contain external access is just as important as what you do internally.
For example, federated identity, API rate limiting, behavioral monitoring for partners, and the ability to
audit what external actors accessed, changed, or initiated.

You must demonstrate that any external integration was properly scoped, permissioned, and
documented. For high-risk vendors, you should show real-time access monitoring and alerting, plus the
termination of access tokens in the event of a breach.

7. You Will be Audited on Your Detection Coverage

The final stage of any cyber insurance claim is technical review. Your insurer will examine whether your
systems were appropriately instrumented to detect what happened. They're looking for coverage across
all major vectors: identity, endpoint, network, data, and cloud security.

It’s not enough to say you have a detection platform. You need to show:

• It caught something.

• Your team acted on the alerts.

• Escalations happened within defined timeframes.

• Decisions were logged.

• Containment occurred within expected response windows.

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