The world’s ability to foster collective action in the face of urgent major crises has reached crisis, with worsening international relations hindering action across a growing array of serious challenges. Meanwhile, a darkening economic outlook, in part caused by geopolitical tensions, looks set to further reduce the potential for international cooperation in 2019. These are the findings of the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2019.
Børge Brende, President of the Forum, said: “With global trade and economic growth at risk in 2019, there is a more urgent need than ever to renew the architecture of international cooperation. We simply do not have the gunpowder to deal with the kind of slowdown that current dynamics might lead us towards. What we need now is coordinated, concerted action to sustain growth and to tackle the grave threats facing our world today.”
At an individual level, declining psychological and emotional well-being is both a cause and consequence within the wider global risks landscape, impacting, for example, social cohesion and political cooperation, the report suggests. It includes a series of “what-if” Future Shocks that examine quantum computing, weather manipulation, monetary populism, emotionally responsive artificial intelligence.
Read the full 114-page report at https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2019.
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Renaud Deraison, co-founder and CTO of Tenable, is among cyber people attending the Cyber Future Dialogue 2019 as part of the WEF annual meeting in Davos in Switzerland. Deraison noted that data fraud/theft and large-scale cyberattacks landed in the top five global risks in terms of likelihood for a second year in the report. “Technological and environmental risks were the only categories to make it into the top five, signalling a global consensus of the power and potential damage created by the digital and natural worlds.
The report also found that the vast majority of respondents expected increased risks in 2019 of cyberattacks leading to data/money theft (82pc) and the disruption of operations (80pc). Given the near daily headline-grabbing data breaches and widespread fears of nation-state attacks, these findings should come as no surprise.
Cybersecurity also made its way to the top 10 global risks in terms of impact. Cyberattacks and the breakdown of critical information infrastructure and networks were ranked seventh and eighth for the potential damage they could cause. This indicates that people not only understand the sheer frequency of cyberattacks, but they also appreciate the risk they pose to our digital economy and our very way of life. These rankings reflect the global impact WannaCry, Equifax and the hundreds of other successful cyberattacks have had on our global psyche.
But while cyber risks have made their way to the global stage, the big question is how will organisations respond? Acceptance of the problems we face is the first step. The next step must be action. We must hold global leaders and executives accountable for managing cyber risk responsibly — we as a society must demand it and as customers, we deserve it. We must shift our thinking away from whom can we blame — from nation-states to 15-year-old hackers in their parents’ basement — to how do we stop them? We must collectively come to terms with the reality of a digital economy — everything is connected, which means every aspect of today’s business opens us up to a potential attack. We must develop security strategies that address the new risks created by digital transformation. Failure to do so will lead to a watershed moment that might have irreparable consequences.”
