The Florida Office of Insurance Regulation has issued subpoenas to Weiss Ratings and its founder Martin Weiss for information related to its recent reports about the financial stability of the state’s insurance carriers.

Geico and Travelers Indemnity Company have been fined $9.75mn and $1.55mn, respectively, for lax data security practices that led to the exposure of 120,000 New Yorkers’ personal information that hackers used to file fraudulent unemployment claims in the Covid-19 pandemic.

Compulsory cyber insurance and tax relief on cyber investment have been identified as two measures that may incentivise greater cyber resilience among UK businesses, with new research by Howden showing that more than half of UK firms have faced at least one cyber attack in the past five years.

The UK Home Office has announced a new industry-backed charter focused on insurance fraud, in a bid to uncover existing loopholes and slash the impact of criminal behaviour on premiums.

Amid the growing impact of nuclear verdicts on corporations and their insurers, broker Aon has said it will no longer place litigation insurance transactions that cover litigation finance firms.

23andMe has agreed to pay $30mn to settle a lawsuit accusing it of failing to protect the privacy of 6.9 million customers, with the genetics testing firm expecting insurance to cover around $25mn of the cost.

Demand for cannabis insurance is skyrocketing but the complex and evolving legal landscape presents unique challenges, according to Duane Morris’s Steven Davis and Seth Goldberg, who note carriers are becoming more comfortable as reinsurers’ appetite grows.

September 3 (Reuters) by Jasper Ward and Chris Prentice – Six credit rating agencies agreed to pay a total of more than $49 million in civil penalties to settle U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charges they broke recordkeeping rules, the regulator said on Tuesday.

Cyber breaches have become the latest honeypot for the US plaintiff bar. Jim Blinn, vice president, client solutions at Zywave, looks at the impact on the insurance industry.

August 15 (Reuters) by Daniel Wiessner – A federal judge in Florida has temporarily blocked a U.S. Federal Trade Commission rule that would ban agreements commonly signed by workers not to join their employers' rivals or launch competing businesses, becoming the second judge to rule that the ban is likely invalid.

The Labour government has started a long-anticipated review into the UK personal injury discount rate, the figure used by courts to calculate lump-sum compensation awards in personal injury cases.

The Hartford has highlighted the necessity for companies to develop robust incident response plans (IRPs) as cyber threats become more sophisticated and frequent, as it addressed the changing risk landscape across a number of areas in its latest Risk Monitor report.

The (re)insurance sector must re-evaluate risk management strategies in response to the “growing challenge” posed by climate change-related litigation, according to the Grantham Research Institute’s annual policy report.

MS&AD has apologised to its customers and stakeholders in a progress report issued to the Japanese Financial Services Agency (FSA) on behalf of its subsidiaries Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance and Aioi Nissay Dowa Insurance.

Andrew Robinson has called out an unnamed global insurer for providing capacity to an MGA offering litigation risk coverage after Skyward Specialty was approached to support the program, calling support for those fueling social inflation “shocking and shameful”.