Davos – experts warned about major cyberattacks

Davos World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2015 – The elite of experts confirms the rising technological risks, notably cyber attacks.

The World Economic Forum in Davos brings together some 2,500 of the top players in the sphere of politics, finance and business. The elite of experts meeting in Davos for the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2015 warned the world about a catastrophic cyberattacks

Eugene Kaspersky, CEO of Kaspersky Lab, has no doubts about our exposition to cyber attacks, our attack surface will increase even more. This means that a growing number of cyber threats will menace a society that is increasingly dependent on IT. New paradigm, such as the Internet of Things, will increase the likelihood being hacked..

“What you call the Internet of Things, I call the Internet of Threats,” told to the assembled global political and business movers-and-shakers explaining that a new family of devices, including smartTV, will be the primary vector for a new generation of threats. “The worst of the worst scenarios is an attack on a big infrastructure, a power plant. If there’s no power, the rest of the world doesn’t work,” Kaspersky cautioned.

The Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves explained that criminal syndicates could create serious problems without having to have outstanding capabilities. Criminal can hit everywhere in every moment, they can steal our data and compromise our systems.

“You can wreak havoc in all kinds of ways,” said Ilves. “Basically nothing is safe.”

Cybercriminals, state-sponsored hackers and cyber terrorists are threatening or society, these actors do not operate in a disconnected manner, their forces overlap giving rise to a threat difficult to mitigate.

“Governments pay criminals … I call it the ‘little Green Men-isation of cyber space’ — you don’t know who’s doing it,” Ilves said, referring to the Russian “Little Green Men” secret service agents accused of engineering the annexation of Crimea last year.

Jean-Paul Laborde, head of the UN’s counterterrorism unit, confirmed that organized crime and extremist groups such as Islamic State could not be approached as disjoint phenomena, they are closely related and are managing global stability.

“They even attack now … in a low key way … police infrastructure, in order to block police action against them outside their terrorities,” said Laborde.

The fight against these threat actors requests a joint effort of government, law enforcement and intelligence agencies that must share an international legal framework to bring these criminals to justice.

A shared legal framework could help law enforcement to operate on a global scale by overwhelming local laws across nations.

The experts also warned about the risks of introducing “backdoors” to communications systems to track criminal activities and prevent attacks. The presence of backdoors, as recently requested by British Prime Minister David Cameron represents a serious threat to the security of everyone. These backdoor could be exploited by foreign government to spy adversaries and by cyber criminals for illicit activities.

Let’s close giving a look to the “The Global Risks report 2015“, in particular, I have extracted for you a couple of interesting graphs. In the following picture is reported the map of the most likely and impactful global Risks.

Cyber attacks are considered events with high impact and high likelihood as confirmed in the report:

“2015 differs markedly from the past, with rising technological risks, notably cyber attacks, and new economic realities, which remind us that geopolitical tensions present themselves in a very different world from before.”

 

In this second graph is illustrated the strict relationship between cyber attacks and other technological risks related to others adverse events.

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Davos, World Economic Forum)