Glossary

The Computer Fraud Coverage Form (CR 00 07) was an Insurance Services Office, Inc. (ISO), crime coverage form that insured against theft of money, securities, or property by using a computer to transfer covered property from the insured's premises or bank to another person or place. This coverage is now available under the computer and funds transfer fraud insuring agreement of an ISO commercial crime policy.

Computer software design errors and omissions policies provide professional liability coverage for computer software designers, analysts, and consultants to cover errors in programs or in systems design. This coverage is often written as part of a package policy arranged for computer firms. The policies, which are provided on a claims-made basis, cover financial losses that result from an insured's negligence. For example, coverage would apply if a software designer's e-commerce program contained a security glitch that allowed hackers to purchase goods with expired credit cards.

A computer virus is a hidden, self-replicating software program, usually containing malicious logic that propagates by inserting copies of itself into and becoming part of another host program. It is designed to infect and gain control over vulnerable systems without the user's knowledge or consent and is activated when a user runs or opens its host program. Computer viruses can cause frequent computer crashes or pop-up messages, corrupt or delete data on a computer, reformat the hard drive, use an email program to spread the virus to other computers, or flood a network with traffic, ultimately making it impossible to perform any Internet activity.

A computer worm is a self-replicating, self-propagating, self-contained program that uses network mechanisms to spread itself. Unlike computer viruses, worms do not require human involvement to propagate. Worms can do damage by reproduction, consuming internal disk and memory resources within a single computer, exhausting network bandwidth, deleting files, or making it impossible to send documents via email.

Concealment is a willful act of holding back information that may be pertinent to the issuance of an insurance policy even though the insured was not asked about that particular subject. A concealment can result in the voiding of a policy.

Concurrency refers to the coordination of the coverage, terms, and conditions of a reinsurance agreement with those of a contract reinsured or between reinsurance agreements. Reinsurance agreements are said to be concurrent when there are no gaps or overlaps.

Concurrent causation is defined as a tort doctrine that imposes joint liability on two or more parties if their negligence combines to produce the same loss. In property insurance, this term refers to a situation where there is a mixture of covered and uncovered perils acting together (either in sequence or simultaneously) to produce the same property damage. In the early 1980s, lower courts in California misapplied tort concepts to the interpretation of first-party property policies and held that, in "concurrent causation" claims, the property insurer is liable so long as one of the causes is covered by the policy. As a result, these courts refused to enforce flood or earthquake exclusions if there was an unexcluded factor contributing to the loss, such as zoning decisions or the negligence of a contractor. In response, insurers added so-called anti-concurrent causation (ACC) language to standard homeowners, commercial property, and other first-party property policy forms to combat this line of thinking. In liability insurance, this term is occasionally used to refer to a situation where there are two or more causes of action asserted in the complaint against the insured, any one of which would be sufficient by itself to hold the insured liable, but some of the causes of action are covered and some are not. In that situation, the liability insurer must defend the entire complaint.

Concurrent insurance exists when two or more policies cover the same exposure and have the same policy period and type of coverage trigger. It is important for primary and excess liability policies to be concurrent.

Conditionally renewable refers to a contract of health insurance stating that the policy is renewable under certain conditions as defined in the contract.

A conditional binding receipt refers to a receipt in life insurance that guarantees that if the risk is accepted, the named insured is insured from the date of issuance of the receipt.