Cyber CAT Bond Market
Cyber catastrophe bonds are a way for insurers and reinsurers to move a slice of their worst-case cyber exposure off their own balance sheet and onto capital markets. An insurer sells a bond to investors; if a cyber event large enough to meet the bond's trigger happens, the investors lose some or all of their principal and that money covers claims. If it doesn't happen, investors collect a healthy coupon for taking on the risk. It's the same basic mechanism that's existed for hurricanes and earthquakes for decades, now being adapted to a peril that doesn't behave like weather.
That adaptation is the hard part. A hurricane has a century of meteorological data behind it. Cyber risk is young, correlated in ways that aren't obvious, and shifts every time a new piece of widely-used software gets a critical vulnerability. A single flaw in one cloud provider, one VPN appliance, or one accounting package can trigger losses across thousands of unrelated policyholders at once — the kind of systemic, "everyone gets hit on the same Tuesday" event that cat bond structures exist to transfer, but that's genuinely difficult to model with confidence.
Who this matters to
I don't structure or sell cat bonds — that's investment banks, specialty reinsurers, and the modeling firms that build the loss curves. What I do is the part underneath that: real technical assessment of cyber risk at the level of actual systems, actual exposure, and actual control maturity, rather than survey-based self-reporting. Insurers, reinsurers, and risk modelers building or validating cyber cat models need inputs that reflect how organizations are genuinely exposed — concentration risk in shared vendors and cloud dependencies, how quickly a given class of vulnerability actually gets exploited in the wild, and where self-reported security posture diverges from reality. That's domain knowledge from doing the assessment work directly, not from reading someone else's report about it.
How I'd approach it
If you're building or stress-testing a model, a trigger definition, or an underwriting view that depends on understanding real-world cyber exposure and incident dynamics, I can work alongside your actuarial and modeling teams as the technical voice in the room — reviewing assumptions about attack propagation, vendor concentration, and control effectiveness against what actually happens during incidents, and flagging where a model's inputs are more optimistic than the threat landscape warrants. This tends to be project-based advisory work rather than an ongoing retainer, scoped tightly to the question you're trying to answer.
If you're on the risk-transfer side of this market and want a second, technically grounded opinion on how a cyber risk is being characterized, get in touch and tell me what you're working on.