Howden Group simplifies cybersecurity insurance compliance with Silverfort’s Unified Identity Protection

International insurance broker, Howden Group, and Unified Identity Protection leader, Silverfort, have formed a partnership to make it easier for organizations to comply with the increasingly strict identity security controls now being required in cyber insurance policies. 

With attackers taking advantage of narrowly deployed MFA solutions, and a lack of protection for non-human identities (Service Accounts) to spread ransomware, steal data and compromise critical systems, the cost of cybersecurity insurance policies has been increasing and exclusions have become stricter. To counter this, many carriers are now mandating identity security controls with greater breadth and depth.  

The partnership seeks to address this compliance need by offering Silverfort’s Unified Identity Protection solution. This will enable Howden Group’s global customer-base to extend MFA to all their sensitive resources, including previously ‘unprotectable’ ones such as legacy applications and directories, Command Line Interfaces and other admin access tools, network infrastructure, industrial OT systems and more, without the need to modify these systems. It also allows customers to discover, monitor and secure the automated Service Accounts often used by attackers in lateral movement - quickly and easily.

Howden Group’s Global Head of Cyber Insurance, Shay Simkin, said, “As a group, we are dedicated to helping our customers get the most out of their cybersecurity insurance policy, which puts a responsibility on them to reach a certain level of maturity.

“Silverfort helps our customers achieve this by vastly reducing the identity attack surface, with MFA on all internal resources and protection for Service Accounts, all without having to go through a long and expensive deployment process. This reduces a large swathe of risk that would otherwise lead to successful ransomware attacks, data breaches and significant disruption.”

As a large global broker with around $30bn in Gross Written Premiums, Howden Group helps insure some of the largest organizations in the world. Silverfort will be offered to the company’s customer-base alongside a set of complimentary products designed to prevent a wide range of risks, including endpoint protection, security awareness training and more.

Hed Kovetz, CEO & Co-Founder of Silverfort, said “Organizations often assume their existing identity controls are sufficient to comply with cyber insurance policies, however this is not always the case. Closing the gaps in MFA coverage and protecting privileged users and non-human identities are increasingly cited by insurance carriers as mandatory – but are often too difficult for customers to implement quickly enough.

“Thanks to Silverfort’s unique technology which doesn’t require any changes to the customer’s systems, we already help hundreds of companies to fully meet these requirements, with a deployment time measured in hours, rather than months. We look forward to helping Howden Group customers fix this problem, quickly and easily.”