Cyber threats falling behind curve in climate-dominated agenda, risk hitting blind spot

Cyber security may be the near-term risk where the world is falling most behind the curve without escaping the blind spot of some key policy makers in the drive for resilience, a key author of the World Economic Forum's 2022 Global Risk Report has indicated.

"Cyber attacks are not new, but their intensification over the past two years means that cyber threats are now growing faster than our ability to prevent and manage them effectively," Carolina Klint (pictured), managing director at Marsh McLennan, said at the report’s unveiling Tuesday.

The Covid-19 pandemic has put firms under immense pressure to digitise, but "too often this has been built on the backbone of ageing technology," she said. And such increased fragilities come just as cyber criminals are stepping up their game at their most dynamic rate.

Frequency and severity are up in turn. Klint cited a record high average cost of data breach in 2021 and, in consequence, cyber insurance rates nearly toying with triple-digit gains as recently as Q3 2021.

It's becoming a story of corporate exclusion. "Companies soon won't be able to claim good ESG credentials without addressing key areas" in cyber security, including critical infrastructure security and identity protection, she said.

The move of ransomware attacks towards "more vulnerable" data-rich organisations, a shift from opportunistic to sophisticated targeting, highlights that threat.

But policy experts in the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Perception Survey (GRPS) continue to focus the bulk of their attention on longer-term climate-related risks, creating the danger that cyber could fall into a policy-maker blind spot, authors suggested.

Asked which risks "will become a critical threat to the world," survey participants name "climate action failure" and "extreme weather" first and third even on a zero-to-two-year time horizon. Those two threats rank first and second on every time horizon thereafter. Livelihood crises and social cohesion erosion round out the top-four for the coming two- and five-year horizons.

Likewise, those four risks plus mental health deterioration top the list of risks that worsened most since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, results of the survey showed.

WEF authors suggest that the overall ranking could spell blind spot for cyber.

"No technological risk appears among the most potentially severe for the next decade," authors warned.

"This suggests lower relevance to respondents—or a blind spot in perceptions given the potential damage of cyber-risks—compared to economic, societal and environmental concerns," authors claim.

The blindest of the blind spots, in the Klint view:  space insurance:  with a record number of launches in 2021 and 70k launch pad events slated for the coming decade, orbital space junk is a threat to global communications and humankind's space ambitions, she said.

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