Industry executives speaking during a recent NetDiligence Cyber Risk Summit in Philadelphia said cyber losses are increasingly driven by operational disruptions, sophisticated fraud schemes, rather than traditional ransomware and data breaches alone.
Not to mention, of course, the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence across business operations presents some new ripples in the cyber-risk landscape.
Christine Mapes, cyber managing directors and counsel at insurer Travelers, said, “The thing that surprises people the most when I talk to them about claims recently versus three years ago or five years ago is the sheer volume of financial fraud and business email compromise (BEC) that we’re seeing.”
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These types of cyber claims account for about 50% of the insurer’s cyber claims. Travelers recorded a 57% increase in the frequency of these claims from the first half of 2025 to the first half of 2026. Claim severity is up about 30% since 2023, Mapes said.
She added that the criminals’ tactics have evolved, moving on from traditional phishing attacks using in BEC.
“Now what we’re seeing is more IT fraud manipulation, the bank fraud manipulation, and the token theft,” she explained. “Instead of them engaging with the victim by asking them to click on a link, they’re actually getting them to turn over the keys to the kingdom voluntarily in a lot of instances.”
AI has emerged not only to help businesses with operations, but to help cybercriminals with their tasks. Blake Feldman, head of the carrier channel cyber incident response at Integreon, said AI is “an arms race.” The technology is being woven into cyber defense tools, but it is also being used by threat actors to access new systems easier – and perform reconnaissance on victims. AI has allowed them to better understand the value of the data they have accessed, and overcome language barriers that, in the past, may have been signals of wrongdoing.
“It’s taken limitations that the threat actor had, [and] it’s accelerated their bandwidth,” Feldman said.
Sara Trokan, SVP of professional and cyber claims at Westfield Specialty agreed, adding that AI “makes impersonation more convincing.”
“We’ve had fraudsters who combine the social media – not just with email or text – but audio, video, email, other communications to make it a very credible scenario,” she said. “We’ve had claims with employees where they generally believe that they were communicating with senior executives about confidential, really confidential business activity. And it ultimately led to them getting large fraudulent payments.”
Risk mitigation may lie in a low-tech solution, panel moderator Lindsay Nickle offered. The vice chair of the cyber team at law firm Constangy said the industry needs to raise awareness similar to the way it handled social engineering five or six years ago, and continue to fight new techniques with a low-tech verification process.
Topics InsurTech Data Driven Artificial Intelligence Carriers Cyber
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