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To: Gottfried who wrote (32213)	1/28/2003 10:47:01 AM
From: Lost1	Respond to of 110652

Hacker Insurance Market Boosted by Cyberattacks By Gina Keating LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The computer worm that clogged Internet traffic and shut down vulnerable corporate networks this weekend also provided another boost to the emerging market for hacker insurance, experts said on Monday. Hacker insurance, also known as "network risk insurance," has been on the market for about three years, but is expected to explode from a $100 million sideshow into a $2.5 billion behemoth by 2005, according to insurance industry projections. This weekend's Internet attack, which virtually cut off Internet access in South Korea (news - web sites) and toppled other networks worldwide, underlined the impossibility of total computer security, said Counterpane Internet Security Chief Technology Officer Bruce Schneier. "I believe that within a few years hacking insurance will be ubiquitous," Schneier said. "The notion that you must rely on prevention is just as stupid as building a brick wall around your house. That notion is just wrong." While investigators continued to probe the identity of the culprit behind the "SQL Slammer" worm, companies were tallying the economic cost of the attack, which continues to grow as businesses become more dependent on Internet infrastructure to conduct their business. At the same time, some security experts questioned whether insurance policies would be effective, given that many of them exclude more incidents than they cover, given the unpredictability of where and how an attack could come. Still, the hacker insurance field got a big boost on Jan. 1, when many existing commercial general liability policies expired and were replaced by policies that contain explicit exclusions for hacker-related losses, attorney Robert Steinberg of Latham & Watkins in Los Angeles told clients in a recent brief. "Particularly given the post-Sept. 11 climate, fears about how such vulnerabilities and attendant magnitudes of loss might impact on national security have reached a critical mass," Steinberg wrote. "That hacking represents a danger to any industry and any type of business is by now a veritable truism." UNCHARTED TERRITORY The SQL Slammer virus, which was a deceptively small and short program that could be easily overlooked, also underscored the increasing sophistication and unpredictable nature of attacks, making it virtually impossible to quantify their impact, experts said