Cyber risk: partnership to drive recovery and resilience

Cyber threats are accelerating across industries. Attacks are more frequent, more sophisticated, and harder to anticipate, which means the question for most organizations is not whether an incident will happen, but how prepared they’ll be when it does. Liberty Mutual responds with a disciplined, partnership-driven approach that helps businesses move from reacting to incidents to confident readiness through trusted cyber insurance solutions.

“Cyber is a very challenging product because the threat landscape continues to evolve,” said Erin Strub Halchak, Head of Cyber, U.S. Underwriting at Liberty Mutual. “The industry tends to be reactive in cyber because it’s hard to predict what the next breach or vulnerability will be.”

The importance of cyber incident response preparedness

As cyber incidents grow more complex, strong prevention alone is no longer enough. Organizations need clarity around how their policies will respond, who to contact, and what steps to take during an incident.

“We regularly speak with our insureds about the importance of being prepared and ensure they know what actions to take when an incident happens,” Halchak said.

This preparation includes:

The need for clarity is especially significant for midsize and smaller businesses. They face the same threat actors as large enterprises, but often lack internal cyber expertise or dedicated resources.

“If that worst-case scenario arrives, you’ll have the full support of our team so that you can respond effectively,” Halchak said. “We provide access to the right vendors to provide assistance to contain the situation and help you negotiate with threat actors if it escalates to that.”

Building a high-performance culture in cyber underwriting

Meeting today’s cyber challenges requires deep specialization and disciplined responsiveness across underwriting, analytics, and client support. For Halchak, this starts with building a strong team culture.

“Our hiring structure, how we’re building the culture on our team, has been one of my biggest priorities in stepping into this role,” she said. “If you can build a strong culture, your people will be motivated to do their best work.”

That includes:

“We want to enable our underwriters to make decisions without sacrificing underwriting integrity,” Halchak said.

She also focuses on helping underwriters challenge assumptions and grow their judgment. “I encourage my underwriters every day, ‘Challenge me, push on me.’ That’s how we grow.”

New solutions for a changing market

Cyber risk is evolving quickly, and Liberty Mutual is updating its product set to meet rising customer needs. Two new products, Liberty Cyber Resolution and Liberty Tech Resolution, are the company’s first major product updates since 2019.

“We’re very excited,” Halchak said. “Our last form was from 2019, so it’s really nice to get a fresh new policy out into the market.”

These updates come as the market experiences shifting conditions.

Liberty Mutual is also expanding the technical tools available to its underwriters. An internal cyber risk assessment platform helps analyze multiple data points and highlight potential vulnerabilities.

“We use those insights to inform insureds about any vulnerabilities they might not have noticed and advise them on how to address them throughout their policy period.”

Artificial intelligence enhances these workflows by improving speed and decision quality. “It improves our workflow and allows our underwriters to move quickly,” Halchak said.

Looking ahead, Halchak expects the industry to adopt more real-time risk intelligence. “We’ve heard a lot of talk about telemetric data and actually plugging that into our insurance network to get a full security review,” she said. “I think over the next 18 months to two years that will be more commonly talked about.”

A partnership-first model for cyber risk

Cyber incidents require coordination across underwriting, claims, and risk engineering. Liberty Mutual’s approach emphasizes clarity and consistency, so clients know who to call and what to expect at every stage.

“We want to be more than an insurance policy. We want to be your insurance partner,” Halchak said.

That partnership model includes:

“It’s not just, ‘Here’s your policy from our underwriter,’ and we move on,” Halchak said. “We coordinate directly with our claims team and risk engineers, so clients know exactly who to contact at Liberty if a claim occurs.”

This unified approach reflects Liberty Mutual’s broader commitment to risk-aware leadership and disciplined responsiveness. As cyber threats continue to evolve, organizations need partners who bring consistent support, deep specialization, and a holistic view of the risk landscape.

“Liberty Mutual is already a market leader in insurance. With our global scale and financial strength, we will be that partner to deliver a holistic cyber risk management solution that helps organizations move from crisis to controlled response,” Halchak said.

To learn more about how Liberty Mutual helps businesses move from reacting to cyber incidents to confident readiness with trusted cyber insurance solutions, visit our cyber insurance website.