John Layden January 11, 2022 16:30 UTC
Updated: 11 Jan 2022 16:57 UTC
toughness, toughness, toughness
The increase in cyber threats is one of the biggest global risks as the world emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a report released today (Jan 11) by the World Economic Forum (WEF).
This World Economic Forum Global Risks Report 2022 The global economic recovery is expected to be volatile over the next three years.
The research, which aims to help leaders develop policies to effectively manage risk, identifies cybersecurity as one of the main areas of emerging threats, along with competition in space, a disorderly climate transition and migration pressures.
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Experts from industry and academia who participated in the WEF study said that a comprehensive cyber risk management plan is a prerequisite for organizations to demonstrate resilience, especially in the face of growing cyber threats.
The study highlights supply chain attacks such as Log4j and SolarWinds Orion attacks as a particular threat:
“In December 2021, just one week after a critical security flaw was discovered in a widely used software library (Log4j), more than 100 attempts to exploit the flaw were detected every minute, illustrating how free-access coding could spread the vulnerability widely.
“Information technology (IT) monitoring and management software also illustrates the potential for contagious exposure that can breach the defenses of critical cybersecurity supply chains, as demonstrated by the Solar Wind Orion attack in late 2020.”
At a press conference for the release of the annual report, Carolina Klint, head of risk management for Continental Europe at Marsh, commented: “Cyber threats are now growing faster than our ability to effectively prevent and manage them.”
“Companies trying to survive the pandemic are under greater pressure to digitize and automate than ever before, but that pressure is often built on pillars of aging technology, leading to disruptions and greater cyberattacks and Ransomware risk.”
Clint warned that the average cost of a data breach has reached an all-time high, which in turn is driving up the cost of cyber insurance policies. For example, cyber insurance policy prices in the US rose 96% in the third quarter of 2021.
The insurance expert named critical infrastructure failures, an increasingly aggressive regulatory environment, unprecedented identity theft and a failure to effectively execute digital transformation as some of the most critical cyber risks that company leaders are grappling with.
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Government, business and NGOs need to work together to build greater resilience at the local, national and global levels, Clint said.
She concluded: “It is important that resiliency measures focus not only on a company’s own assets and processes, but also on vulnerabilities in its supply chain – utilities, service providers, suppliers, and customers.
“Part of the problem here is that societies tend to prioritize efficiency over resilience and growth over sustainability, and that’s a very short-term outlook, and as we’ve seen with the pandemic, that could make Companies are vulnerable to shocks.”
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Additional reporting by Adam Bannister
