Cornerstone Insurance Plc has reaffirmed its commitment to strengthening climate resilience and expanding financial protection for vulnerable communities through its participation in the Lagos Flood Risk Transfer Scheme, an innovative flood insurance initiative expected to benefit approximately four million residents across Lagos State.

Flooding remains one of the most significant environmental and economic challenges confronting Lagos State, with poor and vulnerable communities disproportionately affected by recurring incidents during the state’s annual rainy seasons. As a low-lying coastal city with an average elevation of approximately 1.5 metres above sea level, Lagos faces increasing flood risks driven by rising sea levels, land subsidence, rapid urbanisation, and drainage systems frequently obstructed by waste.

Over the years, the state has experienced increasingly severe flooding, particularly between April and July, resulting in widespread disruption to infrastructure, livelihoods, businesses, and economic productivity. Estimates place the annual economic impact of flooding in Lagos at nearly $4 billion.

To address these growing risks and strengthen the financial resilience of affected communities, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Insurance Development Forum (IDF), with funding support from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), developed the Lagos Flood Risk Transfer Scheme in collaboration with the Lagos State Government.

The initiative is designed to provide rapid financial support to vulnerable residents through an innovative parametric insurance solution that enables faster response and recovery following major flooding events.

Following extensive modelling and technical assessments, a flood footprint-based index was selected as the most suitable insurance model for Lagos State, taking into consideration the city’s exposure to pluvial, fluvial, and coastal flooding risks. Under the scheme, payouts are triggered when flood depths reach 50 centimetres.

After regulatory approval by the National Insurance Commission (NAICOM), the scheme is being underwritten by Cornerstone Insurance Plc alongside three other leading insurance companies, with Africa Re providing reinsurance support.

Speaking on the initiative, the Managing Director of Cornerstone Insurance Plc, Stephen Alangbo, said: “at Cornerstone Insurance, we understand that climate-related risks such as flooding continues to threaten livelihoods, businesses, and vulnerable communities across Lagos State. Our participation in the Lagos Flood Risk Transfer Scheme reflects our commitment to providing innovative insurance solutions that strengthen resilience, support rapid recovery, and deliver meaningful financial protection to those most affected by environmental challenges.”

The sustainability of the initiative is further strengthened by the Lagos State Government’s commitment to incremental premium payments over the next three years. The scheme has also been integrated into the state’s broader disaster management framework, reinforcing coordinated efforts to improve preparedness, response, and recovery for flood-prone communities across Lagos State.

About Cornerstone Insurance

Cornerstone Insurance Plc is licensed and re-certified by the National Insurance Commission (NAICOM) to provide both general and life insurance services. As the first insurance company in Nigeria to offer customers an online platform for insurance transactions, its services are driven by cutting-edge technology, making them easily accessible via internet and mobile platforms.

At Cornerstone Insurance Plc, we remain committed to our core values of integrity, empathy, professionalism, innovation, and team spirit. Our mission is to deliver value beyond expectations through need-based products and exceptional service delivery.

The post Cornerstone Insurance Backs Lagos Flood Insurance Scheme for Four Million Residents appeared first on Business Today NG.

Malware research group vx-underground, which says it has the largest collection of malware source code, said in a post on X that its archive of data amounts to about 30 terabytes.

A reply by Bernardo Quintero, founder of VirusTotal, an online service that scans files for malware across multiple antivirus engines at once, said his service has about 31 petabytes of malware samples that users have contributed to date. (A petabyte is ~1,000-times larger than a terabyte.)

In both cases, that’s a lot of data. For context, cybersecurity companies, AI researchers, and threat intelligence firms treat repositories like these as critical for training detection models and understanding how attacks evolve. But this had us wondering: What would these enormous datasets actually look like stacked as hard drives one on top of the other and side-by-side? And how would they compare to, say, the Eiffel Tower?

Someone in our newsroom asked an AI chatbot this question, and it got it incredibly wrong.

Instead, we did some rough back-of-a-napkin math to figure out how tall these data banks would be. Since vx-underground and VirusTotal both have “about” that much data each, “about” is good enough for us in this case. 

Let’s say we’re using 1 terabyte capacity internal hard drives, since these are generally designed to be the same physical size to fit inside any computer. These standardized 3.5-inch internal hard drives are 1 inch in height, which for the sake of stacking one on top of the other is really what we want to know here.

We’re also assuming that the hard drives we’re using in this example are exactly 1 terabyte, because in reality the total usable file capacity of a hard drive is generally somewhat less. 

Using this online conversion tool, it looks like vx-underground’s 30 terabytes of malware data could fill 30 hard drives stacked on top of one another, reaching 30 inches, or about 2.5 feet tall.

For reference, this reporter is 6 feet tall. (See visual below, and yes, terrible opsec, I know.)

With that same logic, VirusTotal’s 31 petabytes of submitted data would fill 31,744 hard drives, which stacked on top of another would reach about 2,645 feet.

The world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, is slightly taller at 2,722 feet.

The Eiffel Tower is 1,083 feet tall. By that logic, VirusTotal has about two-and-a-half Eiffel Towers’ worth of data.

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