Michael Urbanik
speaker
47 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Michael Urbanik’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Bites and Bytes Podcast · Agroterrorism & Cyber Threats: How Farms Are Under Attack · 4 Mar 2025
podcast
Hey guys, my name is Michael Urbanik. I'm an insurance agent with Arcade Tongue, over a hundred year old brokerage just out of Baltimore. I live down in the Richmond area, but you know, where I fit in all this is working with clients, businesses, understanding what risks do they face and
Any business has a myriad of risks and they only keep evolving and then helping them finding ways to transfer that risk, whether it's via traditional insurance programs, self-retention groups, self-insuring to make sure that they're geared up facing all the threats that avail them. So, yeah, excited to be here.
Yeah, I'll say a recent food fixation of mine is my wife, I and some friends went to a hot pot restaurant here in Richmond. And that was my first time going. And I think we probably sat there for three hours just eating and talking. And a lot of different foods and meats and stuff I'd never had before. So that was a really awesome recent experience and definitely want to go back.
And then, you know, food memory. I was talking to my wife about this. My mom used to have an old school mixer and, you know, with the beaters that would spin and she would make cookies. around Christmas time. And I remember always getting past the beater and licking the cookie dough off of the beater. So we're talking about that. And that's like a very fond memory, right?
That sits in my mind of eating cookie dough off those beaters.
No, but it is.
Yeah. So, you know, if I'm going to define it, I'm going to kind of go to what the government officials are going to define it. And I'm sure as this conversation progresses, we'll we'll go back and we'll talk about events following September 11th. And what is terrorism? Because that's going to factor into insurance pretty substantially.
My goodness. So that'll go back to the, you know, what we pulled is kind of going back to that. There's a risk insurance act that was passed following the attacks of September 11th back in 2001. The act was passed in 2002. Obviously that space, that ideological space has been built out substantially because we really had to think critically what is terrorism and define it.
And that's a very, very hard thing to do. But if we talk about agro-terrorism and I'm going off the FBI's definition now, so we're pretty far into the chapter here, but it's a substance of bioterrorism is defined as the deliberate introduction of an animal or plant disease for the purpose of generating fear, causing economic losses or undermining social stability.
So that's what the FBI is defining it as. And then, you know, we can say, well, what what is terrorism here and what is war? And you're right, Andrew, we had a couple you touched on a couple of keystones there. So certified acts of terrorism is defined by the U S government.
And it's one acts resulting in insured losses that in excess of $5 million in aggregate attributable to all types of insurance subject by the terrorism risk insurance act. The act is,
violent in nature, dangerous to human life property or infrastructure, and is committed by an individual or individuals as part of an effort to coerce civilian participation of the United States or to influence the policy and affect the conduct of the United States government by the coercion.
terrorism excludes or the inapplicability or omission of a terrorism exclusion do not create coverage or injure or damage otherwise excluded under this policy. So that's a lot. It's thick legal language. It's a lot of stuff that the normal lay person doesn't think about. But the concept behind this was September 11th was really an unprecedented attack.
How do insurance companies deal with a risk like this and how does the U.S. government help them? So they more or less attempted to define what is going to fall into this category, what type of loss they put a definition to it, and then they put a threshold saying, OK, if damages exceed this amount, then it's going to fall into this risk bucket.
And that's where the US government and taxpayer dollars can come in to help indemnify and support because terrorism is different than acts of war. Acts of war are completely excluded under all insurance policies. So we're trying to, I guess, give some black and white to this very gray space. And it's an evolving topic.
Some good conversation going on here. I think Hannah's perfectly right. You know, you need to have a good level or a healthy level of skepticism and treat things with common sense.
and it can be challenging with farm or any sort of animal production area or grow area because it's a large space and it's hard to secure a large space you know this isn't like a simple shop downtown where you have a door and maybe one or two entry points you know 360 degrees around the perimeter people could you know
jump offense or climb a tree or get over and it is hard so you need to secure what you can have a healthy level of skepticism those are the things that you're going to want to do to protect yourself and what insurance carriers are going to want you to do so you can become insured and get a good, reasonable price when it comes to property insurance.
And, you know, that's kind of the tangible stuff. You know, then you can talk more about the intangible stuff, which is computers. And, you know, any industry that uses a computer is susceptible to digital attacks, cyber activism, hacking, just being a target.
And the question, I think if you're a business owner, you're listening to this and you ask yourself, if I lost use of my computers for a week, two weeks, How would that interrupt my operation? And maybe 10 years ago, you might say, oh, not that much. I could keep rocking and rolling without those. But I think every business nowadays would be seriously hampered and damaged.
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