“Catastrophic Cyber Event” Predicted by 2025 at World Economic Forum

Well, the latest prediction from the 2023 World Economic Forum (WEF) isn’t awesome. Their outlook? That business leaders fear there will be a global catastrophic cyber event in the very near future.

“The most striking finding that we’ve found, 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,” WEF managing director Jeremy Jurgens said while presenting the WEF Global Security Outlook Report 2023.

“This is a global threat,” Jürgen Stock, Secretary-General of Interpol, said. “It calls for a global response and enhanced and coordinated action.” Stock stated that world leaders need to work together to make fighting cybercrime a priority as new tools and methods of attacks are developed every day.

Albania is taking Stock’s advice. As the victim of a massive cyberattack, the country is now working with several larger allies in an effort to thwart cybercriminals from successfully conducting their attacks. Edi Rama, Albania’s Prime Minister, said during the WEF presentation that the cybercrime industry is expected to reach $10.5 trillion in 2025. It was noted that if cybercrime were a state, it would be the third largest behind the U.S. and China.

Rama also cited that a catastrophic cyberattack could have devastating consequences.

“Let’s imagine an exponential multitude of viruses that mutate everyday exponentially while not threatening our body, but the bodies we live in, our organizations, our countries, our system, then, you know, it could be just apocalypse. It’s about viruses that can not only block our way of living, but can control it and deviate it,” Rama said.

Story via Popular Mechanics