Risk managers are very concerned about the cyber risks facing their companies and are heavily investing in protection against cyber attacks with the blessings of their boards and CEOs, a major shift from even just 10 years ago when convincing a company to worry about cyber was a big challenge for risk managers.

However, the new challenges for them include getting the right coverage from the insurance market and ensuring their companies have enough coverage in the event of a major breach, three risk managers on a recent panel at Advisen’s Cyber Risk Conference in San Francisco said.

(TNS) — Authorities at all levels have planned six months in advance of April 16, when the 122nd Boston Marathon race will take place. This year commemorates the fifth anniversary of the marathon bombings that left three dead and hundreds injured, and officials say their safety methods have adapted since that devastating day.

"I'm sure everyone can remember where they were, who they were with and what they were doing when the bombs exploded," said MBTA Transit Police Chief Kenneth Green at a security briefing in Boston on Tuesday. "It was that devastating to us."

"However with the passing of time human nature has its way of minimizing events that occur," Green added. "We cannot become complacent."

(TNS) - A number of cities big and small in Southern California are taking steps to identify seismically vulnerable buildings for the first time in a generation, acting in part on the devastating images of earthquake damage in Mexico and elsewhere around the world.

“What happened last year in Mexico City, we don’t want to experience in California,” David Khorram, Long Beach’s superintendent of building and safety, said of the quake that left more than 360 people dead. “We want to be progressive.”

In hopes of mitigating the loss of life from a major quake that experts say is inevitable, Long Beach is discussing spending up to $1 million to identify as many as 5,000 potentially vulnerable buildings.

Insurers have received more than 2,000 insurance claims totaling more than $421 million in losses from the deadly Montecito, Calif. mudslide that destroyed or damaged more than 400 homes and businesses and killed 21 people, the California Department of Insurance reported.

The total number of claims included more than $387 million in residential property losses, more than $27.2 million in commercial property, and roughly $2.5 million in personal and commercial auto.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — More than $421 million in claims have been filed since deadly mudslides tore through the coastal community of Montecito during extremely heavy January rains, California's insurance commissioner said Monday.

Insurers have received more than 2,000 claims for residential and commercial losses, commissioner Dave Jones announced. Those include $388 million for residential personal property, $27.2 million for commercial property and $6.7 million for auto and other lines of insurance.

Recently burned by California's largest recorded wildfire, the hillsides of Montecito northwest of Los Angeles could not absorb the rainstorm with an epic downpour of nearly an inch (2.5 centimeters) in 15 minutes early on Jan. 9.

Uber Technologies Inc. won’t renew a license to operate self-driving cars in California while the company evaluates how one of its vehicles killed a pedestrian in Arizona last week.

The San Francisco-based company told the California Department of Motor Vehicles that it will let its license expire at the end of the month, according to a letter from the department’s deputy director. The self-driving car program is under intense scrutiny following a collision on March 18 that killed a woman in Tempe, Arizona. All of Uber’s autonomous-vehicle tests have been on pause since the incident.

The nation’s two dedicated first responder networks are going live this week with private core services for members, representatives of both entities said.

In a news release, officials at AT&T, the service provider for the First Responder Network Authority, announced the launch of FirstNet’s core network across 56 states and territories March 27. The core network, the company said, will have a controlled introduction to a limited customer set while it is tested extensively, followed by the onboarding of more customers, likely in April or May.

Meanwhile, officials at Verizon announced the private core of their own dedicated network for public safety and first responders would become “generally available” to all members beginning on March 29.

The California Department of Industrial Relations on Monday issued a progress report on its anti-fraud efforts, including updates on the suspension of 227 medical providers from treating California’s injured workers and the dismissal of 292,000 illegitimate liens with claims valued at more than $2.5 billion.

(TNS) — Pacific Gas and Electric Co. plans to unveil a sweeping set of steps to prevent wildfires or contain them when they erupt.

The utility, whose equipment is being investigated as a potential cause of the Wine Country fires last fall, will create a wildfire prediction and response center in San Francisco that will operate around the clock during fire season. The company will greatly expand its own network of weather stations to monitor conditions, adding hundreds more this year.

PG&E will contract with out-of-state firefighters, keeping them on retainer for emergencies. And it will harden its electrical grid to better endure windstorms, replacing wooden poles with sturdier steel ones over time.

(TNS) - It’s now way easier to find out if you live in a California earthquake fault zone.

The California Geological Survey has published an easy-to-use interactive map online — type in your address or share your location on your smartphone, and, voila, you’ll know if you stand in a fault zone.

Or, for that matter, a place at risk of liquefaction or a landslide unleashed by an earthquake.

What these three zones have in common is the risk the ground can break in an earthquake, and not just be shaken.