Categoría: Technology

It is very likely that we will all suffer the consequences of a cyberattack at some point, so it is important to know and keep ourselves informed, in order to establish strategies and action plans in case they occur.
Implementing cybersecurity measures has gone from being an option to a necessity, because due to the pandemic, cybercriminals have become even more determined to wreak havoc.

As a promise is a promise, here are 4 more cases of cyber-attacks that occurred in the first three months of 2021:

5. Bombardier Company:

In February 2021, Canadian aircraft manufacturer Bombardier suffered a data breach and as a result of the hack, confidential supplier and customer data was compromised.

The investigation revealed that an unauthorized party gained access to the data by exploiting a vulnerability in a third-party file transfer application. In the same vein, the data that was stolen made its way to the Clop ransomware website.

6. Acer

The Taiwanese company Acer, one of the three largest computer manufacturers worldwide, was the victim of a $50 million ransomware attack, the largest to date. It was the victim of a $50 million ransomware attack, the largest to date.

The attackers shared several images of alleged documents they managed to steal during the attack, including financial spreadsheets, bank balances and banking messages.

7. Accellion

About 100 companies around the world that use the Accellion FTA (File Transfer Application) file sharing service were hacked.

Experts attribute this activity to the hacker group FIN11.

The list of those affected by this attack includes: supermarket company Kroger, telecommunications industry leader Singtel, the University of Colorado, cybersecurity company Qualys, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC).

8. Sierra Wireless

On March 20, a ransomware attack disrupted the production of equipment from Sierra Wireless, a Canadian manufacturer of IoT devices.

The company’s products are used around the world in corporate and industrial networks, including commercial enterprises, government organizations, as well as energy, transportation and other companies.

Technology has brought a host of advantages and benefits to everyone’s lives, but it has also brought obstacles along the way, as interconnection has facilitated the spread of threats across networks, making it necessary to secure companies’ IT systems.

The reality is that every day companies and their collaborators face a constant battle to protect their data and any confidential element, thus avoiding the theft of information that is used for blackmail.

Data theft can mean a disruption in the daily management of companies and a significant economic outlay to restore order. Training our employees so that they know how to take care of computer systems is an essential necessity, as is having security software that is updated in search of new threats to prevent them.

It is no secret that the emergence of the Internet and various technologies has made it possible for many companies to revolutionize themselves, going from being traditional to innovative and digital. However, it has brought many consequences such as cyber-attacks.

Not everything is rosy, despite the existence of technologies and all kinds of tools that bring value to companies, there are others that threaten the latter, through organized attacks against their computer system in order to block it, damage it or obtain information.

There are no vacations for cybercrime, in fact it has been on the rise for several years and there are no trends to reduce it, quite the contrary, in fact the COVID-19 pandemic only made things worse.

4 powerful cyberattacks in Q1 of 2021

1.Channel Nine (9News Australia)

The Australian channel was the target of a massive cyber-attack, which caused the interruption of its transmission. This was reported by the TV Blackbox portal (specializing in TV industry news).

9News was preparing to broadcast the next issue of the investigative program, «In Investigation», when the cyber-attack occurred.

In the same vein, the 9News Australia team, expressed on Twitter the following: «Whether this is criminal or foreign government sabotage is currently under investigation, but it is clear that this attack could expose a vulnerability at a national level».

2. CNA Financial

CNA, one of the largest insurance companies in the United States, was cyberattacked via a variant of the Phoenix CryptoLocker malware.

On March 21, cybercriminals deployed a ransomware program on the CNA network that encrypted 15,000 devices.

The malware also encrypted the computers of remote employees who were connected to the corporate VPN throughout the attack.

3. Florida Oldsmar Water System

According to the u-gob.com article, we were able to learn that cybercriminals hacked the computer system of the water treatment plant in Florida, trying to poison the water of approximately 15,000 residents, with the increase of sodium hydroxide content in the water more than 100 times, (normal 100 ppm to 11100 ppm).

How did it happen?

The incident took place on the morning of February 5, 2021. The cybercriminals gained remote access to an employee’s computer via TeamViewer and then took over the station’s internal computer control systems.

4. Massive attack on Microsoft Exchange servers

At least 60,000 companies and organizations worldwide have been attacked by a hacker due to a vulnerability in Microsoft Exchange Server.

This resulted in more than 30,000 emails from U.S. government and commercial organizations being hacked, according to the KrebsOnSecurity report.

According to the tech giant, the vulnerabilities allowed Chinese hackers to gain access to email accounts and install malware to access servers at any time.

Want to continue to expand on this interesting content? In our next article, you can find out more about other relevant cyberattacks that occurred in the first sadly of 2021.

As the last part of this sequence of articles where we explore in depth the past and present of telematics, we now want to show you the predictions and what will come in the future for this type of technology. Pay close attention!

The Future (2022-2030)

Tom Wilson, CEO of Allstate, stated at a recent Bank of America Securities virtual conference that «if you don’t go telematics, you’re not going to be in business for very long, at least profitably».

Within the next 10 years, the norm for the U.S. personal vehicle market is expected to be as follows:

1.Customers will download an app from their insurer on their phone to be insured. It will continuously use the smartphone’s sensors to provide a superior customer experience:

Pay-as-you-go, telematics-based renewal pricing, or a traditionally rated policy based solely on traditional variables such as age, credit score, etc.

The telematics application will have more than 40% of daily active users, as already demonstrated by some international insurers. These interaction frequencies are not far from social networks.

2.Telematics will prevent risks proactively, through real-time warnings in risky situations, as well as through driver enhancement with rewards for safe driving.

Some international insurers have already implemented it and have managed to reduce their expected losses.

3.Claims touch points will be improved through the use of telematics data and collaboration between humans and AI:

Policyholders will enjoy more efficient processes, from proactive FNOL when accidents are detected, to claims triage, adjudication, and repair and payment.

4.Customers will use their insurers’ applications to select from customized telematics-based service offerings and additional risk transfer solutions.

In conclusion…

Forward-thinking insurers are already preparing to welcome telematics, which will require process transformation.

It may not be enough to have a UBI product: the technology itself has a cost, which is why insurers will need to use telematics data effectively to generate a return on this investment.

Finally, insurers will need to educate both externally and internally. Not only will it be enough to communicate the benefits of telematics to potential clients, but they will need every internal functional area to have a basic understanding of it.

As promised in the previous article, here we will tell you what insurance companies have done to further strengthen telematics in our days.

The 3 implementations on the insurance companies

• Added structured behavior change mechanisms such as cash back earned on each trip to reward and encourage less risky behavior.
• Leveraged telematics data leveraged in claims processes to improve the customer experience and increase both the efficiency and effectiveness of claims handling.
• Introduced «try before you buy» applications, getting more accurate pricing on the first quote, in order to attract better risks in each pricing group and reduce premium leakage due to bad risks.

Additional use cases allow them to build more robust UBI business cases, creating value in insurance profits and losses. In the same vein, it makes it possible for them to create more attractive value propositions for customers:

The more value you create, the more you can share with policyholders in the form of discounts, rewards and cash back.

These incentives, in turn, attract new customers, driving further adoption.

Vision for the future

Forward-thinking insurers investing in these innovations today are progressively building the skill set needed to master the use of telematics data in the insurance business.

This will not only create faster-growing and more profitable UBI portfolios, but also proactively address the transition to future mobility.

Lack of maturity

However, much of the market has not reached this level of maturity. Underwriting remains the most common area in which insurers use telematics, although some are beginning to explore other areas.

The percentage of insurers implementing or testing telematics has remained virtually unchanged since 2018 (insurers already participating, many of which have measured positive ROI, continue to innovate).

Insurance companies whose internal technology environments are still mid-transformation may find it more difficult to support value-added telematics functions. For them, the value proposition of telematics as a whole is less clear.

In particular, insurers need substantial data capabilities to manage RBU data at scale and innovation capabilities to transform the way business has been done for decades.

And what can we predict for the future of telematics? In the third and final part of this series of articles we will tell you, along with an overall conclusion to this whole innovative and interesting topic.

Forward-thinking insurers have been preparing to rely on the help of a wide range of technologies to enable them to innovate in today’s competitive world, one of which is telematics.

Telematics has been one of the challenges for the insurance industry, so it needs to change its vision and transform processes in order to use the data collected in a more efficient way and in turn generate a return on investment.

What is the telematics?

According to the article «What is telematics?«, it is a term that encompasses different technologies and includes the various telecommunication devices that support the sending, receiving and storing of data; devices integrated into automobiles that allow them to be tracked and controlled while in motion; and satellite navigation (and all its applications).

In the same sense, the word is mainly used in the context of vehicles, which implies the application of all these technologies to road cars.

Telematics is transforming the auto insurance market and the business model that has traditionally applied to auto insurance. Insurance companies around the world are learning from the experience of those who have already innovated in telematics in order to develop their own competencies.

General context

Insurers have spent the last 20 years exploring the potential of telematics and it is known that during 2020, 8.2 million U.S. auto policyholders will share driving data with an insurance company, this is evidenced by research from the IoT Insurance Observatory, a global think tank that has aggregated more than 100 «players,» including eight of the top 15 U.S. insurance insurers.

Insurer participation in the «telematics zone» has been steady over the past few years and this is known from the annual surveys of insurer members of the Novarica Research Council’s CIO.

Thus, the larger insurance companies that have implemented telematics have generally indicated positive experiences, which can be broken down as follows:

More than $1 billion in annual premiums written.

However, in the following articles, we want to expand in depth a vision of the subject, where we will explain what the past, present and future of telematics by insurance companies contemplates.

We will visit each element point by point and you will be able to learn about the changes and the reason for each one.

The Past (1998-2016)

During this time telematics in insurance was becoming known, as well as the benefits it could provide. Progressive’s Snapshot program has been the pioneer in programs supported by OBD/Dongle telematics.

These programs were careful not to scare off early adopters. They also offered discounts, monitored driver behavior on a temporary basis, and many did not even impose surcharges on bad drivers.

The value to insurers came largely from self-selection, i.e., only good drivers were interested in signing up. Despite this, insurance companies that were able to effectively manage the use of telematics data for rating not only performed better financially, but were also able to maintain an average retention rate of over 94%.

As a result, the number of policyholders sharing data with an insurer grew to 3 million in 2014, but then stabilized. However, then insurer engagement faded and market sentiment on UBI turned pessimistic.

After nearly 20 years and significant investment, only 1.5% of U.S. drivers were sharing telematics data with their insurers.

The Present (2017-2021)

While there came to be much speculation that perhaps UBI would die before we could see its potential, the truth is that around 2017, the insurer Allstate created Arity, a company dedicated to telematics, whose focus was on the use of the smartphone as a sensor.

Similarly, data collection that relies on mobile devices, managed to significantly increase the use of telematics by simplifying registration processes. Likewise, we can note that the market will grow 30% annually in 2019 and 2020.

The pandemic caused by COVID-19 made it possible to increase (even more) awareness of RBU among media, agents and customers, especially in pay-per-mile mechanisms, which means stronger growth in 2021, such as new mileage-based programs.

Initially, it was not clear whether mobile devices would be a suitable source of telematics data, but mobile-based solutions have been the growth driver of telematics in recent years.

The new approaches rely on sensors in the cell phone, sometimes paired with a tag attached to the vehicle, and monitor the policyholder throughout the duration of the coverage.

Continuous monitoring has allowed many major insurers to further expand the way they use telematics data, so we leave you an open invitation to join us in our next article with part two, where we will tell you about predictions for the future of telematics.

Wait for it soon! 🙂

We have already seen in previous articles the impact of Cloud Computing, what it is, its benefits and the most important providers, that is why we decided to compile in a top 3, the best known success stories of this technology:

1.General Electric:

This company is one of the largest conglomerates in the world. It is known that by 2014 it was already starting to implement a digital transformation strategy, which revolutionized the way of working they had maintained up to that time.

In 2017, the company chose Amazon Web Services as the primary provider to host more than 2,000 applications and services in the cloud, a choice that was one of the most important transformations for General Electric. They were able to redirect resources to innovation tasks that were previously occupied designing and maintaining conventional data centers.

2.Netflix:

It is one of the pioneers in entertainment and distribution of audiovisual content online and despite being a technology company until recently had not bet on cloud services.

Thanks to the boost given by the popularity of their service and the demand for them, they had to migrate their traditional data centers to a Cloud environment in order to be able to supply all their subscribers.

3.New York Times:

The well-known American newspaper The New York Times needed to convert 11 million articles and images from its archive to PDF format, a task that could be very time-consuming, couldn’t it?

The company’s IT department estimated that the project would take about seven weeks. However, a developer using 100 instances of Amazon EC2 managed to complete the job in 24 hours.

From 7 weeks to 24 hours…. That’s how great technology is.

Other cases that we can mention that are equally important are:

Spotify, which can offer music streaming services as if the user had the songs on their device.

Mercedes Benz F1, uses the cloud to quickly analyze car performance data, a critical function in motorsport.

The pharmaceutical company Novartis uses the cloud to manage and analyze massive amounts of data generated during drug development.

Cloud Computing impacts on a large scale

The impact of cloud computing is found in literally every sector: healthcare, education, sports, entertainment, technology, banking, etc. This favors large companies in their innovation and growth.

Regardless of the company, migrating data to the cloud can help reduce costs and provide greater accessibility to information at any time and from any device.

In previous articles of our blog, we explained to you what Cloud computing is all about and its benefits, that’s why we want to introduce you to the main providers of this technology, and here they are! How many of them do you know?

The best Cloud Computing providers that exist in the market, according to the article «Top 6 Cloud Service Providers who’ll dominate the Cloud War» are:

1.Amazon web services (AWS)

It has enabled companies around the world to develop their digital infrastructure fully or partially using the cloud and half of the cloud users were under its umbrella. In 2019, their growth slowed, but they still managed to stay on top as market leaders.

Amazon recently launched AWS Storage Gateway, which allows customers to connect their existing storage and backups to the cloud, with a single console for accessing storage configurations.

In addition, another of its technologies is AWS CloudFormation, which enables enterprises to control the resources and application stacks required for mobile and web applications, i.e. customers have access to the infrastructural components of the cloud service with a central command line interface to manage them.

2. Microsoft Azure

It is the closest competitor to AWS and getting closer all the time. Microsoft has a plethora of services including Office 365 cloud services, Dynamic 365 enterprise subscription and LinkedIn services. This makes it difficult to compare its services directly with its competitors or other cloud service providers.

One of the useful features of Microsoft’s cloud solutions is the Microsoft Azure machine learning service, where users can develop, test, deploy, manage, move and even monitor their machine learning model in a cloud-based environment using this service.

A number of large giants have partnered with Azure to move a significant portion of their operations to the cloud. One prominent example is the five-year partnership between Microsoft and Disney.

3. Google Cloud

By 2019, Google had reported average revenues of $8 billion per year through its cloud business, where just two months earlier, the company reflected average annual revenues of $4 billion per year.

Likewise, the company has regularly introduced several changes to carve out a niche for itself as an enterprise cloud computing giant. One such change was the simplification of contract terms and conditions, along with compliance certifications.

Recently, the company acquired the Looker platform, which offers analytics solutions to cloud users.

According to Deutsche Bank analysts, the cloud service is expected to reach a $38 billion annual sales mark by 2025.

How is the cloud present in LISA?

As we love technology and we look for all the alternatives so that the insurance industry can take the step to go digital, we are always looking for tools that mean a paradigm shift.

LISA has AWS and Google and with that we can deploy our applications (Homer, Burns, web, back, front), which does not limit our resources despite being robust. The processing and storage of information happens faster than we can imagine.

With the passage of time, «The cloud», managed to have an annual growth rate of the service, standing at around 30% between the years 2013 and 2018. This service, as we explained in our previous article, consists of storing and ordering data from any type of server on the Internet and does not limit the deployment of applications even if they are «robust».

7 benefits of Cloud computing

• It favors the digital transformation of a company due to the large amount of data that is handled daily.
• Due to Covid-19, there has been expansion of sales channels and digital services, so having data storage service to servers located on the network is important.
• Applications, services and data are not installed on a local computer, but are provided as a service, through a private or public cloud. Private clouds are hosted in a company’s own servers or data centers, while public clouds are hosted by external providers.
• Lower cost and greater profitability, since insurers do not have to invest in the purchase of equipment and data centers, but pay for services that they benefit from.
• They allow mobility and access from anywhere, making it possible for the company’s information to stop being only in the office.
• There is greater security, since the data used in companies is no longer at risk in the event of a computer failure. All data will remain in the cloud thanks to regular and automatic backups.
• Greater sustainability, since it changes the model we had until now of information management, but also makes business activity more sustainable (from an environmental point of view). With the use of virtual equipment there is no need to have physical equipment or servers that have to be renewed every few years, with the cost that this entails.

Using cloud computing is not something simple, however, having profiles with knowledge in this type of systems and a change in the business culture, it will be possible for insurance companies to unlock a range of benefits in their processes and tasks that until now have been conventional.

Our mission is to provide insurance companies with cutting-edge technology, so that they can operate in a more satisfactory way, saving time and costs and promoting customer loyalty. To achieve this, LISA deploys its applications with the help of the cloud, having access to its servers at all times without the need to limit resources.