E-Business Insurer Raises Premium on Windows NT.An insurer specializing in e-business risk underwriting Underwriting 1. The process by which investment bankers raise investment capital from investors on behalf of corporations and governments that are issuing securities (both equity and debt). 2. The process of issuing insurance policies. said it will charge 5% to 15% more to cover the risk of hacker A person who writes programs in assembly language or in system-level languages, such as C. The term often refers to any programmer, but its true meaning is someone with a strong technical background who is "hacking away" at the bits and bytes. attacks on Internet systems that use Microsoft Corp.'s Windows NT (Windows New Technology) A 32-bit operating system from Microsoft for Intel x86 CPUs. NT is the core technology in Windows 2000 and Windows XP (see Windows). Available in separate client and server versions, it includes built-in networking and preemptive multitasking. software, claiming it has identified certain claims trends in those systems. Microsoft disputes the finding, saying its hasn't heard of any such trend in discussions with any insurance carrier. J.S. Wurzler Underwriting Managers Inc., a Lloyd's underwriter, said claims experience shows that NT-based systems tend to suffer more downtime The time during which a computer is not functioning due to hardware, operating system or application program failure. as a result of hacker attacks than other operating systems Operating systems can be categorized by technology, ownership, licensing, working state, usage, and by many other characteristics. In practice, many of these groupings may overlap. . John Wurzler, founder and chief executive officer, was quoted in Interactive Week as saying, "we saw that our NT-based clients were having more downtime" from hacker attacks. Microsoft spokesman Jim Desler said he didn't have any information on Wurzler's action and that Microsoft hadn't heard of any such concern from other insurers. "None of the carriers we deal with had said any such thing," Desler said. "Internet and Web site security insurance is a new business. We believe there is not enough information about the business to judge such risks accurately." Russ Cooper--a computer security expert with TruSecure Corp., a computer risk-management and security firm, and editor of NTbugtraq.com, which tracks and disseminates information about Windows NT systems, said there is no method he knows of that would make sense in singling out Windows NT software as a greater claims risk than other systems. "If you look at reported instances of security problems, Unix-based systems are 10 times riskier than NT," Cooper said. Robert Hartwig, chief economist The Chief Economist is a single position job class having primary responsibility for the development, coordination, and production of economic and financial analysis. It is distinguished from the other economist positions by the broader scope of responsibility encompassing the with the Insurance Information Institute, said insurers that specialize in Internet and e-commerce underwriting have just begun to gather enough claims experience to fine-tune their pricing. "What you're probably seeing here is the discovery of a new rating system," Hartwig said. He compared Wurzler's move to what auto insurers did in response to sport-utility vehicles sport-u·til·i·ty vehicle n. Abbr. SUV A four-wheel-drive vehicle with a roomy body, designed for off-road travel. . "There are certain factors that influence pricing in a particular line," he said. "Apparently he identified Windows NT as one of those factors." |
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