A Catastrophic Mutating Event Will Strike the World in 2 Years, Report Says

Original article here.

The 2023 World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, has filled us with lots of uplifting predictions, like how companies will soon decode our brain waves. The latest warns of a global catastrophic cyber event in the very near future.

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

Add in the extreme unpredictability of these events—Jurgens cited a cyberattack recently aimed at shutting down Ukranian military abilities that unexpectedly also closed off parts of electricity production across Europe—and the global challenges are only growing.

A country that recently experienced a massive cyberattack, Albania is now working with larger allies to fight off the criminals, serving as a kind of laboratory for people to see what’s coming.

Edi Rama, Prime Minister of Albania, spoke during the presentation and said that the growth of the cybercrime industry – from US$3 trillion in 2015 to an expected US$10.5 trillion by 2025 – means that cybercrime is the third largest global economy would be if it were a state after the USA and China.

That means the coming crime could be truly catastrophic.

Citing the global response to COVID-19, Rama said a cyber attack could be much more substantial:

“If we imagine an exponential multitude of viruses mutating exponentially every day, not threatening our bodies but the bodies we live in, our organizations, our countries, our system, then it could just be an apocalypse. It’s about viruses that not only block our way of life, but can control and change it.”