Cyber risk: Increasing international awareness

This is my sixth consecutive year participating in the Annual Meeting of the New Champions, the meeting for Global Growth Companies of the World Economic Forum. For a technology company like WISeKey, this gathering is an exceptional way to reach a great community of leaders and be able to interact with other Global Growth Companies. Based on my experiences at international gatherings for over 30 years, including many United Nations summits during my previous UN position and later as founder of WISeKey International technology events, this event in China is quite unique – even if compared with the Annual Meeting in Davos in January.

At the Annual Meeting of the New Champions, WISeKey has had the opportunity to express our vision, ideas and technology, and to position the company as an opinion leader on the complex issues we are trying to solve, such as building a Global Digital Identification Ecosystem, protecting personal data and allowing millions to perform highly secure social interactions, payments and cyber security-related transactions over the trusted Internet. The World Economic Forum ranked cyber-attacks as one of the top five 2012 risks in the world. This has increased international awareness of the risk, allowing my team and myself to have more impact when introducing the subject to audiences.

Another way in which this event is unique is by allowing experts from different backgrounds to interact and bring their contribution to an interoperable knowledge base on issues such as the growth of social networking and cloud computing, and the complexity of data sovereignty ownership of data, which are essential for our work.

Recently, as part of my work as Vice-Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Illicit Trade I have had the opportunity to work with an amazing team of experts on cyber security, international trade, anti-counterfeiting and law enforcement. The team works on developing models and suggesting solutions to eradicate this major issue, which for the counterfeiting industry alone represents 5-7% of all world trade and is increasing daily. The interactions between Council Members from different areas allow for a holistic approach and bring concrete actions to jointly and progressively improve the state of the world. This is just a small part of what happens at this GGC meeting, but this is the reason why I keep coming.

Author: Carlos Moreira is Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of WISeKey. He is also Vice-Chair of the Global Agenda Council on Illicit Trade.

Picture: REUTERS/Samantha Sais