Cyber Insurance Gets a Security Posture Discount
Cloudflare has launched a cyber risk partnership program with cyber insurance carriers and incident response providers, letting customers qualify for discounted premiums or enhanced coverage based on their Cloudflare security deployment. The partnerships also establish rapid-response channels for organizations actively under attack.
The program reflects a broader shift in cyber insurance underwriting: carriers increasingly reward policyholders who can demonstrate concrete security controls rather than simply charging higher rates across the board.
Why Ransomware Broke the Insurance Market
Ransomware has fundamentally disrupted the cyber insurance market. The U.S. Treasury Department reported that financial services firms filed Suspicious Activity Reports linked to nearly $600 million in possible ransomware payments in the first six months of 2021 — a 40% jump over all of 2020. Treasury investigators also identified roughly $5.2 billion in bitcoin transactions as potential ransomware payments, suggesting the real figure is far higher.
For insurers, the payout pressure is severe. Research cited by Cloudflare shows ransomware accounts for 41% of cyber insurance loss events, followed by funds transfer loss at 27% and business email compromise at 19%. With loss ratios climbing, traditional carriers are either hiking premiums — increases of 50% or more, with some quotes approaching 100% — or denying coverage outright to organizations without adequate security measures.
Small and medium businesses feel the squeeze most acutely. A reported 70% of ransomware attacks target organizations with fewer than 1,000 employees. Many of these businesses lack both the security budget and the leverage to negotiate favorable terms, leaving them exposed at precisely the moment attack automation and insecure remote access tools have widened their attack surface.
Three Insurers, One Common Signal
Cloudflare's insurer partners take the opposite approach: rather than penalize risk, they incentivize mitigation. Customers running Cloudflare's security suite can qualify for premium discounts or credits and enhanced coverage with At-Bay, Coalition, and Cowbell Cyber. The pitch to underwriters is straightforward — Cloudflare customers see lower frequency and severity of attacks, which translates into better loss ratios.
At-Bay CEO Rotem Iram says the combination of pricing incentives for Cloudflare's DDoS protection and At-Bay's own active risk monitoring has driven ransomware in its portfolio down to a rate seven times below the market average. Coalition CEO Joshua Motta frames the pairing of Cloudflare technology with insurance as "an entirely new way" to protect businesses. Cowbell Cyber founder Jack Kudale notes that encouraging best-practice security adoption through premium savings matters most for SMBs, which he calls "increasingly the center of these attacks."
Incident response providers: On the response side, Cloudflare announced relationships with CrowdStrike, Mandiant, and Secureworks to enable rapid referral of organizations under attack. The goal is to eliminate the time lost when a customer under DDoS or ransomware pressure has to figure out which vendor to call and how to reach the right team. CrowdStrike's Thomas Etheridge emphasizes that response speed determines outcomes; Mandiant CTO Marshall Heilman and Secureworks' Chris Bell likewise point to the value of coupling Cloudflare's global platform with proactive incident response expertise.
Looking Ahead: Shared Threat Intelligence
Next on the roadmap is programmatic threat intelligence sharing between Cloudflare and its cyber risk partners. Through the Cloudflare Security Center, customers will be able to opt into sharing their security posture information with partners, enabling easier and more transparent underwriting. Cloudflare's network vantage point — seeing the scale and heterogeneity of attacks across the internet — gives it data on long-tail risks that could inform both insurer pricing and incident response preparedness.
The partnerships cover the full risk lifecycle: prevention through Cloudflare's security suite, financial transfer of residual risk via the insurers, and active remediation through the incident response providers. For organizations still facing double-digit premium hikes or outright coverage denials, having a documented security architecture with a major CDN and edge security provider may become the new baseline qualification for affordable cyber insurance.
