Cybercrime gang Scattered Spider is the top suspect in several recent cyberattacks in the U.S. insurance sector, and it’s likely that threat actors could still be lurking in other insurers’ IT environments, said Peter McMurtrie of consulting firm West Monroe.
“What we’ve seen with Scattered Spider is that one of their MOs [methods of operating] is to secure actual identities of employees of a company as a means of access, and in doing so it makes it harder to detect that penetration that has occurred and defend against that,” he said.
“It can be that they’re choosing to acquire that information, but then not necessarily take advantage of it right away, but rather maintain that,” he said.
“So, I think that added risk is having an incident occur – but you’re not able to detect it because there’s not active malicious activity going on. It is sort of sitting, and perhaps leveraging that information to do something later,” he said. “That does make this unnerving,” he said.
While insurers including Aflac, Erie Insurance and Philadelphia Insurance Companies have all recently detected potential data exfiltration incidents linked by researchers to Scattered Spider, “the thing that worries me is that there are more that have occurred,” he said. “But we just haven’t learned about it yet.”
In the interview (see audio link below image), McMurtrie also discussed:
- Why cybercriminals are targeting insurers;
- Critical steps for incident prevention and response in the insurance sector;
- The use of agentic artificial intelligence in insurance and its potential risks.
McMurtrie is a partner of the insurance practice for West Monroe, a global business and technology consulting firm. McMurtrie has C-suite experience across a variety of insurance disciplines. His three decades of experience cover all types of insurance – from core product lines of personal and commercial insurance to ancillary lines including accident and health, pet, travel and medical stop loss products. Prior to joining West Monroe, McMurtrie was president of property and casualty commercial insurance at Nationwide Insurance.