We review the academic literature on “cyber risk” and “cyber insurance” in the fields of business (management, economics, finance, risk management and insurance) and actuarial science. Our results show that cyber risk is an increasingly important research topic in many disciplines, but one that so far has received little attention in business and actuarial science. Business research has documented the manifold detrimental effects of cyber risks using event studies and scenario analyses, while economic research is especially concerned with trade-offs between different risk management activities. Quantitative research including papers published in actuarial journals mainly focuses on loss modelling, especially taking dependencies and network structure into account. We categorize the empirical literature on cyber risk to filter out what we know on the frequency, severity and dependence structure of cyber risk. Finally, we list open research questions which demonstrate that cyber risk research is still in its infancy and that there is ample room for future research.
