When you go to the doctor for a yearly checkup, do you think about health or insurance? You probably think about health, but the practice of going to the doctor for regular checkups began because of large life insurance companies in the United States. These companies began using statistical methods to make risk or to build actuarial tables they could use to set the premiums properly. Originally, life insurance companies relied on the “hunches” of their salesmen, combined with some checking by people in the “back office,” to determine the correct premium. Over time, they developed networks of informers in local communities, such as doctors, lawyers, and even local politicians, who could describe the life of anyone in their area, providing the information the company needed to set premiums correctly.

Over time, however, statistical methods came into play, particularly relying on an initial visit with a doctor. The information these insurance companies gathered, however, gave them insight into what habits increased or decreased longevity—they decided they should use this information to help shape people’s lives so they would live longer, rather than just using it to discover the correct premiums. To gather more information, and to help people live better lives, life insurance companies started encouraging yearly doctor visits, even setting up non-profit organizations to support the doctors who gave these examinations. Thus was born the yearly doctor’s visit, the credit rating agencies, and a host of other things we take for granted in modern life.

You can read about the early history of life insurance and its impact on society in How Our Days Became Numbered.

What does any of this have to do with networks? Only this—we are in much the same position in the cyber-insurance market right now as the life insurance market in the late 1800s through the mid-1900s—insurance agents interview a company and make a “hunch bet” on how much to charge the company for cyber-insurance. Will cyber-insurance ever mature to the same point as life insurance? According to a recent research paper, the answer is “probably not.” Why not?

First, legal restrictions will not allow a solution such as the one imposed by payment processors. Second, there does not seem to be a lot of leverage in cyber-insurance premiums. The cost of increasing security is generally much higher than any possible premium discount, making it cheaper for companies just to pay the additional premium than to improve their security posture. Third, there is no real evidence tying the use of specific products to reductions in security breaches. Instead, network and data security tend to be tied to practices rather than products, making it harder for an insurer to precisely specify what a company can and should to improve their posture.

Finally, the largest problem is measurement. What does it look like for a company to “go to the doctor” regularly? Does this mean regular penetration tests? Standardizing penetration tests is difficult, and it can be far too easy to counter pentests without improving the overall security posture. Like medical care in the “early days,” there is no way to know you have gathered enough information on the population to know if you correctly understand the kinds of things that improve “health”—but there is no way to compel reporting (much less accurate reporting), nor is there any way to compel insurance companies to share the information they have about cyber incidents.

Will cyber-insurance exist as a “separate thing” in the future? The authors largely answer in the negative. The pressures of “race to the bottom,” providing maximal coverage with minimal costs (which they attribute to the structure of the cyber-insurance market), combined with lack of regulatory clarity and inaccurate measurements, will probably end up causing cyber-insurance to “fold into” other kinds of insurance.

Whether this is a positive or negative result is a matter of conjecture—the legacy of yearly doctor’s visits and public health campaigns is not universally “good,” after all.