In 2025, cyber-insurance underwriters are no longer satisfied with basic risk assessments. To secure a policy or better premiums, your business has to demonstrate strong cybersecurity practices, including verifiable evidence of your security posture.
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Below, we explore some critical requirements a cybersecurity insurer looks at before offering better premiums and complete coverage against potential cyber threats. Additionally, we discuss actions you can take to make your business compliant and attractive to insurers.
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is fast becoming a required cybersecurity control by most cyber-insurance underwriters in 2025.
For your insurer to provide coverage, your company must implement MFA across all critical systems. That includes email, VPNs (remote access), administrative access, servers, firewalls, and other sensitive assets, reducing your risk of unauthorized access and data breaches.
MFA has proven to be an effective tool in preventing cyberattacks. It stops approximately 90% of unauthorized access attempts by requiring users to provide two or more forms of verification before gaining access to systems. Using MFA significantly reduces insurer risk and claim expenses, making it a mandatory feature for your business to be eligible for coverage.
Moreover, you must deploy MFA on all privileged and non-privileged user accounts across on-site and remote access points. Ensure critical infrastructure, such as servers and firewalls, uses MFA, as they are often high-risk entry points targeted for intrusion.
MFA is also critical to compliance with regulatory requirements, which means your insurer may reject coverage or deny your claim if MFA and other key controls were not in place when a breach occurred.
Patch Management Cadence
Insurers view a good patch management cadence as a critical requirement for cyberinsurance. A formal and documented patch management process keeps you compliant and makes you eligible for coverage and desirable to many cyber insurance companies.
Your patch management tools should actively seek, identify, prioritize and apply security patches across your critical systems and software on demand. Since regular patching fixes known system vulnerabilities, it significantly lowers your cyber risks, making it easy for insurers to underwrite your company.
Use automation and modern tools to handle patching at scale and to improve efficiency. Doing this reduces delays and human error which can significantly increase your exposure to cyberthreats.
For cyberinsurance eligibility, use risk-based prioritization to ensure all your patching efforts protect you from critical and easily-exploited vulnerabilities. Additionally, regularly review and give detailed reports on patch status and effectiveness to all your business stakeholders. This improves stakeholder confidence and enhances your attractiveness to cyberinsurers.
Regulatory Compliance and Standards
Before underwriting your company, a cyberinsurer expect you to align your cybersecurity programs with evolving regulations and recognized standards. Doing this helps your business reduce cyber risk and qualify for coverage or better premiums.
Depending on the scope of your business, you may have to follow various regional and sector-specific laws such as GDPR (European Union), HIPAA (U.S. healthcare), PCI DSS (payment card data), and emerging laws like Canada’s Consumer Privacy Protection Act (CPPA).
Some of these regulations have evolved in 2025, including the EU’s NIS2 Directive, Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) for financial sectors, and the UK Cyber Security and Resilience Act (CSRA). In the U.S., the Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act (CIRCIA) mandates rapid reporting of cyber incidents to federal agencies, and this act affects over 300,000 entities.
Failure to comply with regulatory requirements and standards not only exposes you to potential data breaches, but also to potential legal risks and penalties. Cyberinsurers often tie underwriting policies and premiums to regulatory alignment, and may deny claims or reject coverage if you fail to comply with relevant regulations.
By staying compliant and maintaining required documentation, you help your business meet insurance criteria, reduce your premiums and strengthen your overall security posture against evolving threats.
AI-Specific Controls and Governance Frameworks
Cyberinsurers also pay attention to how your business governs, secures, and monitors your AI systems. Even in a rapidly evolving environment, cyberinsurers require businesses to create and implement AI-specific security controls for risk reduction and premium eligibility.
Critical to your success are formal AI governance policies that define who is responsible for AI oversight, how AI is procured and integrated, and who approves model deployment. These policies should also have policies that address data security, compliance, and risk management when using generative AI and large language models in your operations.
Set up policies that ensure rigorous data validation and protection protocols to prevent your AI from ingesting sensitive or unauthorized material into training sets. Set up controls for data loss prevention (DLP) tools that also monitor and limit the exposure of sensitive or proprietary data from unauthorized access.
Additionally, expand penetration testing and vulnerability scanning targeting all your internal AI applications. Doing this helps you identify and patch vulnerabilities early, reducing your risk of zero-day attacks and other threats.
Security Awareness Training
Since human error is the largest contributing factor to cyber incidents, your insurer expects you to educate your workforce consistently and effectively. Proper security awareness training should cover phishing, ransomware, business email compromise, and other threats that affect your workforce directly.
Insurers usually require documented cybersecurity training at least annually or biannually. Your training should cover recognizing phishing attempts, secure password practices, incident reporting procedures, and social engineering threat awareness. For better results, regular training ensures your employees stay engaged and retain what they learn.
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Create a cybersecurity-aware environment that prevents risky behavior from your employees. With a proactive approach to cybersecurity, your improved employee behavior reduces the likelihood of breaches and improves incident response, influencing insurance eligibility and premiums positively.
Additionally, establish frameworks and best practices such as NIST Special Publication 800-50 and CIS Critical Security Controls v8, which cover essential topics and measure effectiveness.