World Economic Forum: A New Approach to Cybersecurity Needed to Avert a Cyber Pandemic

The World Economic Forum (WEF) is calling for a new approach to cybersecurity. WEF’s Centre for Cybersecurity has created a community of security and technology leaders to identify future global risks from next-generation technology in order to avert a cyber pandemic.

What policies, practices and partnerships are needed to prevent such a cyber pandemic? This question was raised in sessions on Thursday 28 and Friday 29 January at the Davos Agenda 2021, featuring commentary from Check Point Software Technologies, Cloudflare, Fortinet, INTERPOL, Cyber Security Agency of Singapore and AustCyber.

The Forum has created Future Series: Cybercrime 2025, a joint program of work with the University of Oxford – Oxford Martin School, enabling organizations to share and develop research, insights and responses to future risks as a community.

The initiative convenes over 150 global experts from the world’s leading companies, research institutions and public-policy departments. Major collaborators include Palo Alto Networks, Mastercard and KPMG, and support from such institutions as Europol, ENISA and NIST.

The first findings and recommendations of the community’s work were recently published in the Cybersecurity emerging technology and systemic risk report.

WEF says the critical technology transformations on which future prosperity relies – ubiquitous connectivity, artificial intelligence, quantum computing and next-generation approaches to identity and access management – will not just be incremental challenges for the security community.

Experts believe that unless action is taken now, by 2025 next-generation technology, on which the world will increasingly rely, has the potential to overwhelm the defenses of the global security community.

Next-generation technologies have the potential to generate new risks for the world, and at this stage, their full impact is not well understood. There is an urgent need for collective action, policy intervention and improved accountability for government and business.

Without these interventions, WEF says it will be difficult to maintain integrity and trust in the emerging technology on which future global growth depends.