Cybersecurity does not usually feature prominently at big tech events. It is rare to find a kingpin in the fight against cybercrime among the stellar keynotes of his Main Stage. It does not lack, perhaps for this reason, a certain complex of killjoys to the sector.
At one of their annual meetings, held in Boston (USA), the CISO of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Steve Schmidt, acknowledged that they had asked the exhibitors spread throughout the Convention and Exhibition Center to avoid apocalyptic graphics and such of twilight messages that your marketing teams love so much. Instead, the general atmosphere was one for celebration and play.
There is no great value. The reality is that today’s world is more like the lawless Wild West than the orderly, fair, Cartesian urban landscape that emerged from modern revolutions, as cybersecurity companies such as the Spanish S2 proclaim to the four winds. At the e-Crime & Cybersecurity Congress that has just been held in London, the instructions of Steve Schmidt’s team have certainly not been followed.
Attendees were greeted with phrases such as “the threat of cyber warfare has to do with a global pool of vulnerabilities, accidentally accumulated as a by-product of continuous innovations in connectivity.” This is a topic, by the way, that has a lot to do with it and is directly linked to generating innovation without thinking about the consequences that the career of artificial intelligence has brought back to the present day.
The big issue that was going around by word of mouth at the e-Crime & Cybersecurity Congress was, however, money-making geopolitics. From March 31, Lloyd’s of London will require all cyber insurance policies to specifically exclude coverage for losses related to attacks or acts of war behind which a State is found.
The action of government-backed hackers, whose attacks are often politically motivated, can “expose the market to systemic risks” that are difficult to manage, as reported by this peculiar market (syndicate) of British insurance and financial companies.
Obviously, the Putin-ordered invasion of Ukraine has inflamed the battle, but cyberattacks are reaching other countries, multiplying, and it is no longer easy to determine if they are acts of war in nature, or if they have simply become the new the state in which global.
In fact, Lloyd’s of London has chosen not to leave anything to chance and notes that coverage for losses caused by cyber attacks by a nation state that “significantly impair another state’s ability to function” or its security has ended. . All in general. Whether or not they are an act of war. Spot.
The Zurich Group also joins this initiative. Its general director, Mario Greco, believes that it is no longer enough to focus on compliance with the Data Protection Regulation (RGPD), because that means ignoring the real global context. Cheat solitaire. “There must be a perception that this is not just about data… this is about civilization. These people can seriously disrupt our lives, ”he recently said.
Yes, insurance premiums continue to rise as insurers learn more about the frequency of attacks and the damage they cause. The truth is that one of the questions to be analyzed right now is, why not say it openly, establishing a correct and reliable model to set the premium to be applied in each case.
The lines between cyberspies, cybercriminals and cyberarmies have blurred. In response to this, regulators are looking at operational resilience in key sectors such as finance. Among their priorities they have set something as apparently elementary as ensuring the wholesale payment market.
In a world that is heading towards the creation of large ecosystems of connected devices, be they companies, cities, large infrastructures and even communities of gamers In the metaverse, with the action of the platform economy capable of turning cars and planes into offices, shopping centers and leisure centers, the issue of cybersecurity could not be more imperative.
The experts gathered in London recognize that there is no material capacity to train the number of computer scientists that would be needed to protect us, so that developments in automation and artificial intelligence will have to be used. It is no longer a problem to entertain IT nerds anyway, but a challenge that requires a strategic risk management response.
