Companies in the energy sector are in a good position to purchase cyber risk insurance policies, as prices are at their lowest in recent years, but this period won’t last long, said George Dragne, Head of Business Development and Energy Industry Leader at WTW, one of the world’s largest insurance brokers.
“The market as we speak today is a very soft market. It is a market in which I believe there have never been better costs for cyber risk insurance,” Dragne said, at the DigitALL 2026 conference organized by Energynomics in Bucharest.
He added that the decline in prices is the result of high demand, which has attracted numerous insurers to this segment, creating intense competition. The level of claims in the market still allows for underwriting at favorable rates, but this situation will not last. The complicated geopolitical context of recent years has increased cyber attackers’ propensity to target high-impact sectors: energy, healthcare, telecommunications, and other critical infrastructure. Dragne mentioned that a cyberattack on a player in the Romanian energy sector took place the week before the conference, though he could not disclose details.
The cost of a cyber insurance policy is determined based on the desired coverage limits and the company’s actual exposure. To help organizations understand what they need to insure and at what value, WTW offers a free assessment tool called Cyber Quantified, which allows for the quantification of cyber risk before signing any contract.
“The first question clients ask me is: how much coverage should I buy? And IT tools can help us cross-reference data on a global scale,” explained Dragne.
He drew attention to a worrying gap between risk awareness and the concrete measures taken. Citing a study by DNV Cyber (the cybersecurity division that protects Norway’s national energy system), Dragne noted that two out of three top managers involved in energy projects are concerned about technological risks. However, there is a significant gap between this concern and actual actions.
Cyber risk is, in his view, one of the most complex risks from an insurance perspective, precisely because insurance solutions are part of a broader package of measures to mitigate financial impact. Moreover, attackers are increasingly using artificial intelligence, which makes attacks more and more sophisticated, putting additional pressure on both companies and insurers to keep up.
“We must be increasingly prepared to respond under conditions of uncertainty,” said Dragne, especially given the paradox that organizations are bombarded with massive volumes of data but have less and less clear information on which to base decisions. The solution, in his view, is robust risk analysis combined with the constant training of organizations’ cybersecurity teams for unpredictable scenarios.
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Dragne warned that artificial intelligence is not a magic solution to cyber threats. AI models operate on statistical principles and can help filter and sort through a huge volume of alerts, but they cannot make predictions about unprecedented events.
“Anyone who thinks AI makes predictions about the future, that it’s some kind of Nostradamus, is sorely mistaken,” he said.
In this context, cyber incident management teams become essential, but building them takes time. These are socio-technical systems, made up of people and technology, and people must be constantly trained through simulated scenarios and stressful situations to be able to improvise and react quickly.
“You won’t find these things in a team that’s only been around for a year or two,” Dragne warned.
The DigitALL 2026 conference was organized by Energynomics, with the support of our partners: CBRE Romania, Eaton Electric, EnergoBit, KSTAR New Energy, WALDEVAR Energy, and WTW Romania..