SAWT BEIRUT INTERNATIONAL

| 15 October 2024, Tuesday |

An ‘apocalypse’: Report warns of a ‘catastrophic cyber event’ in next two years

With several companies and countries falling victim to cyber attacks, cyber security has become a huge issue in the past few years. Everyone who has been affected or is at risk of being affected by cyber attacks has been trying to deal with the problem. Now, a new report on cyber security has warned that in the coming two years cyber attacks might pose an unprecedented threat.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Security Outlook Report 2023 has predicted that a “catastrophic cyber event” is on the way and will hit us in the “near future”. WEF managing director Jeremy Jurgens, during a presentation, said that “geopolitical instability makes a catastrophic cyber event likely in the next two years”. Jurgens said that the prediction comes from 93 per cent of cyber leaders, and 86 per cent of cyber business leaders. “This far exceeds anything that we’ve seen in previous surveys.”

Talking about cyber security, Jurgens referred to a recent cyberattack that aimed to shut down Ukrainian military abilities, but unexpectedly led to closing off parts of electricity production across Europe.

Secretary-General of Interpol, Jürgen Stock, was also present and called it “a global threat”. “It calls for a global response and enhanced and coordinated action.” He urged multiple bad “actors” who benefit from cybercrime to encourage world leaders to work together to thwart all such efforts.

Albania, one of the countries that fell prey to a massive cyberattack recently, has now been working with larger allies to fight cyber criminals. Edi Rama, Albania’s prime minister, came up with some shocking numbers at the presentation, saying that if cybercrime was a state, it would be the third largest global economy after the US and China. Rama said that the cybercrime industry stood at $3 trillion in 2015 and is expected to grow to $10.5 trillion in 2025.

Rama compared the predicted cyberattack to a virus like Covid-19 and how it can turn to an “apocalypse”.

“Let’s imagine an exponential multitude of viruses that mutate everyday exponentially while not threatening our body, but the bodies we live in, our organisations, our countries, our system, then, you know, it could be just apocalypse. It’s about viruses that can not only block our way of living, but can control it and deviate it.”

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