The WEF Annual Meeting includes government leaders, businesses, and civil society addressing the state of the world, while also discussing the priorities of the year ahead.
“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 seen in previous surveys,” says WEF managing director Jeremy Jurgens during a presentation, highlighting the WEF Global Security Outlook Report 2023.
Adding to the unpredictability of the turn of events, Jurgens cited a recent cyberattack that was intended to disable Ukrainian military capabilities but inadvertently also shut down a portion of the production of energy across Europe.
In regards to this, Jürgen Stock, Secretary-General of Interpol, says that “This is a global threat[…]It calls for a global response and enhanced and coordinated action.”
According to him, the increased profit that various bad actors acquire from cybercrime should encourage world leaders into working in a collaborative manner, making it a top priority as they face “new sophisticated tools.”