We talked with Dr. Daniel Woods of the University of Innsbruck about our list of topics in February of 2021. Besides a short introduction of the topics, in the video we also rate them with regards to their feasibility and relevance for academia and the industry.
Getting into cyber insurance and risk quantification is not a straightforward process yet. Compared to varying degree well-established paths of starting a career in cyber security, established insurance lines of business, actuarial modeling, or insurance law, many current practitioners of the cyber insurance ecosystem are first exposed to the topic when they start their careers in the respective field, usually right out of university/college, or when they transition into it from their previous professional field.
While there are already a few dedicated degree university courses on cyber insurance, the majority of students that might have heard of cyber insurance will at most have had a single semester course on the topic and might have difficulties writing their bachelor or master thesis about cyber, be it for lack of awareness, availability of suitable academic chairs, or a lack of awareness for possible research topics. These difficulties are further magnified by the vastness and interdisciplinary nature of the topic, For example, a bachelor student of cyber security might be interested in cyber insurance, but not able to find access to the financial or law aspects of the topic during the completion of just three months.
While bachelor and master theses allow students to take a deep dive into a given topic and push the envelope (within reasonable constraints), cyber-economics.com wants to lower the barrier of entry for the cyber insurance and risk quantification industries and combat the chronic skill-shortage of quantitative cyber risk professionals by providing students and perhaps even academics with a list of topics that are suitable for a thesis and of ongoing interest for academic research community and industry.
As the quantification of cyber risk in an open field that touches many current and future industries and academic disciplines, we categorize the research topics broadly into qualitative and quantitative topics, with an occasional overlap of methods and thesis topics. In addition to the thesis topics, we provide the reader with literature recommendations that serve as a natural first step to dig deeper into a given topic.

Daniel Kasper
Daniel Kasper is the principal of Cyber Economics.