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w w w . C A N A D I A N L a w y e r m a g . c o m O C T O B E R 2 0 1 6 47 hen Patrick Bourk started tout- ing cyber-liability insurance to clients a decade ago, he got little more than blank stares in return. "The insurance mar- ket was near barren in terms of interest," says Bourk, a trained lawyer who is also the senior vice presi- dent of Integro Insurance Brokers in Toronto. Five years ago, a higher proportion of his audience knew what he was talking about, but they were almost as unlikely to take him up on the offer. "They would often profess to have the best IT department in the world to handle their cyber-liability exposures," rendering insurance "unnecessary," Bourk says. Since then, a series of high-profile and costly breaches at some of the largest companies in the world has gradually chipped away at that confidence: In the U.S., retailers Target and The Home Depot each suffered breaches that compromised the debit and credit card data of millions of customers, while closer to home, hack- ers exposed the personal details of users of the Canadian dating web site Ashley Madison, which specializes in facilitating extramarital affairs. Earlier this year, the University of Calgary also admitted pay- ing off cybercriminals to unfreeze almost 10,000 faculty and staff e-mail accounts after its systems were infected with a ran- somware virus. Demand for cyber-insurance products has in turn "grown exponentially," as busi- nesses come to terms with the possibil- ity they could be the next victim of a headline-making cyberattack, according to Bourk. A recent study by Pricewater- houseCoopers attempted to put numbers to the trend, predicting annual premi- ums worldwide, which stand currently at around US$2.5 billion, will double to about US$5 billion by 2018 and treble to US$7.5 billion as soon as 2020. "It's growing at a rapid clip," says John Davis, whose Toronto firm Gilbertson Davis LLP has recently formed a cyber- liability sub-specialty within its insurance L E G A L R E P O RT \ I N S U R A N C E L AW W TARA HARDY Demand for cyber-insurance on the upswing Awareness about cyberbreaches has reached the mainstream, but the law is still nascent By Michael McKiernan