Ever wondered why this podcast is named “The Cowbell Factors”? In this episode, you’ll find out from our SVP of Marketing and Tech Partners, Isabelle Dumont. Here are some key takeaways:
- The Cowbell Factors are the foundation of everything we do at Cowbell. They are a unique way to evaluate a business or organization for cyber risk, specifically for insurance.
- Cowbell ingests a lot of data to evaluate every organization against its industry peers. From that, we’re able to assess how big of a risk they are for us to insure in order to protect them against cyberattacks.
- Cowbell Factors are calculated by collecting 1,000 individual data points ranging from general information (e.g., revenue and employee count) to detailed risk information (e.g., number of IP addresses). Then, we compare that data to our risk pool and produce our Cowbell Factors, or risk ratings: Company Aggregate and other, more granular Cowbell Factors (e.g, Software Supply Chain, Dark Intelligence, Network Security, Cloud Security, and more).
- Our risk pool currently consists of 30 million SMEs, which represents 92% of the U.S. SME market. It is constantly growing and we are continuously updating that pool with new data.
- The Company Aggregate Cowbell Factor indicates whether a company overall is more or less at risk of a cyber incident compared to its industry peers. In other words, is that company more or less secure than its peers? This is important in our risk selection.
- We’re often asked how policyholders can improve their Cowbell Factors. This all depends on how they compare to their industry peers. There is no ideal number to reach; the goal is to stay above the industry average.
- Cowbell Insights are the companion to Cowbell Factors as they highlight everything we discover that can be a potential weakness in one’s cyber risk profile. In addition to highlighting potential weaknesses, we give insights and recommendations on how to improve. This is one of the value-adds that we offer to policyholders (link)
- This continuous risk improvement is effective! Check out our Q3 Cyber Round-Up report to see that at renewal, the Cowbell Factors of Cowbell’s policyholders as benchmarked against their respective industries shows a 9% improvement.
For more, be sure to listen to Isabelle’s full podcast episode. Visit the Cowbell Factors Podcast library to listen to last season’s episodes and subscribe to stay up to date on upcoming ones. It is available on most podcast platforms (iHeartRadio, Spotify, Google podcast, Apple podcast, Anchor, and Radio Public). If you enjoyed this episode, consider rating it with 5 stars on Spotify and Apple!
