“The most striking finding that we’ve found,” WEF managing director Jeremy Jurgens said during a presentation highlighting the WEF Global Security Outlook Report 2023, “is that 93 percent of cyber leaders, and 86 percent of cyber business leaders, believe that the geopolitical instability makes a catastrophic cyber event likely in the next two years. This far exceeds anything that we’ve see in previous surveys.
“This is a global threat,” Jürgen Stock, Secretary-General of Interpol, said during the presentation. “It calls for a global response and enhanced and coordinated action.” He said the increased profits that the multiple bad “actors” reap from cybercrime should encourage world leaders to work together to make it a priority as they face “new sophisticated tools.”
Instant Future’s Brock Hinzmann looks at another side of the question of this claimed coming cyber catastrophe: The catastrophic cybercrime event prediction seems plausible, technically, but illogical, except for criminals that have the sole purpose of ransom. Transnational crime actually depends on the system to continue working as it does. That is, full of corruption. This one could be played various ways. I wonder if criminals that depend on the system for money laundering and paying for weapons would hunt down and kill a cyber ransom criminal.
But there’s another way to look at it—the down and dirty psychology of the cybercriminal. Most of these criminals are working alone or in relatively small groups, and are intent on cashing in and getting away. A major international crime organization would think twice before destroying the systems it too requires. But most cybercriminals are independent, or close to it, and they aren’t likely to be think about the big picture. They’re all about short term thinking. That’s the nature of criminal venality. So I’m very much afraid this prediction can come true…HOWEVER: new quantum-computing could stymie cyber criminals with algebraic lattices which can be infinitely complex and impossible to decrypt.
According to Popular Mechanics: “Abstract structures, lattices are enormous grids with many individual points across two, three, or potentially hundreds of dimensions.”
Will hackers or, say, North Korean cyberattack teams obtain their own quantum computers? Not right away. But if they do, will they be able to use them to break this new cryptography? If they do–it won’t be easy. It might cost them more than they would make on their criminal enterprise.
