Businesses are building a global response to cybersecurity risks

What policies, practices and partnerships are needed to prevent a cyber pandemic?

The World Economic Forum’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.

The Forum launched a joint program of work with the University of Oxford - Oxford Martin School, enabling organizations to share and develop research, insights and responses to cybersecurity 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.

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.

Unless action is taken now, by 2025 next-generation technology, on which the world will increasingly rely, has the potential to overwhelm the defences of the global security community.

Next-generation technologies have the potential to generate new cybersecurity 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, it will be difficult to maintain integrity and trust in the emerging technology on which future global growth depends.

The initiative was launched by the World Economic Forum to identify what approaches are required to manage cybersecurity risks in the face of the major technology trends taking place in the near future:

Skills gap.
There is already a global capacity shortage in cybersecurity (specialists and throughout the wider workforce) and as new technologies emerge, the skills gap in delivering cybersecurity will widen.

Fragmented approaches.
Emerging technologies are driving an increasing interdependence and entanglement between policy and technology at a time when the global governance of cyberspace is weak.

New approaches.
Existing operational-security capabilities and technologies will not be fit for purpose, so mitigating threats and responding to incidents individually and collaboratively will require new approaches.

Underinvestment.
Security is not being considered as an integral component of technology innovations and as such, proper investment is not being made into support (knowledge, guidance, research investment) and incentives (market forces, regulation) for developing emerging technologies securely.

Ambiguous accountability.
Shared dependence widens the pool of actors affected by the resilience of a part of the ecosystem, built can also create ambiguity in the accountability for ensuring this resilience.

The World Economic Forum’s Centre for Cybersecurity is calling on the global community to implement the recommendations made in its Future Series report.

A new approach to dealing with cybersecurity risks is needed. The security and technology community, industry and government leadership and the international community must intervene to ensure that security issues are addressed in such a way that the benefits of emerging technology are inclusive.