WEF panelists: cyber frontlines crawl into uncharted territories

If a nuclear war breaks out, you’ll know about it. It’ll most likely be plastered across the news and social media – if only for a few hours until the world ends. Cyber warfare is, of course, less visible. But it’s already raging, experts say.

At the World Economic Forum, cybersecurity professionals who participated in one of the summit’s panels discussed how geopolitical crises are extending into uncharted territories these days.

Indeed, almost every day now, we hear about major ransom attacks paralyzing hospitals and other major infrastructure, and the cyberwar between the US and China is escalating.

Late last year, Chinese hackers breached the ultra-sensitive systems of the US Treasury Department. They also hacked telecommunications networks across America and gained the ability to shut down US ports, power grids, and other targets almost at will.

Sources told The Wall Street Journal back then that China’s keyboard warriors, “once seen as the cyber equivalent of noisy, drunken burglars,” have become astonishingly skilled and stealthy cyber soldiers, building leverage inside US computer networks in case open conflict between the countries breaks out, say, over Taiwan.

Needless to say, cyberspace is a dangerous place right now. How can the international community move towards a detente?

Constant attacks

“Every day, we're stopping over 220 billion attacks on our customers. Whenever there is conflict in the political space, we almost always see cyber conflict follow,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, an American IT and cybersecurity giant.

“When we saw Russia invade Ukraine in 2022, we saw cyber warfare, too. Fortunately, Ukraine managed to protect most of its critical infrastructure, but cyber is definitely a major part of any conflict now.”

Joe Kaeser, chairman of the supervisory board at Siemens Energy, agreed: “We're always a target because, as a company, we’re always an early part of the supply chains. It's a constant struggle, and I'm afraid we're only at the beginning of it.”

And then there are civilians, of course. Mirjana Spoljaric Egger, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), stresses that there are no conflicts where cyber operations don’t play an important role.

“There are cyber operations that target civilian infrastructure. Energy and water facilities and hospitals are attacked, as are communication systems. In fact, even disabling communications to prevent cyberattacks has an impact because civilians rely on information – deactivating comms harms civilians, too,” said Spoljaric Egger.

What can we do? Better preparedness is a must, Andrius Kubilius, European commissioner for defence and space says. According to him, institutions need to effectively cooperate to prevent the spread of attacks and, actually, to have rapid reaction teams to stop the hits immediately. New rules are also needed, Kubilius added.

Then again, these rules and norms already exist, Samir Saran, president of the Observer Research Foundation, pointed out. The United Nations of Governmental Experts said years ago critical infrastructure shouldn’t be targeted in any sort of attacks.

“And yet everybody breaches the agreement. The cyber frontlines are actually universal – everyone can be attacked at any time. You, me, everybody. And with AI, any amateur can become a true cyber soldier,” said Saran.

The side with the most data usually wins

There are circumstances, though, that are softening the impact of cyber warfare. Prince calls them “the big puzzle.”

He predicted a massive increase in cyberattacks when the conflict in Ukraine broke out but it hasn’t happened. Why? First, once you use the weapon it’s gone or it’s very hard to use again. Besides, the Russians are very aware of the concept of mutually assured destruction.

“Russia’s infrastructure is every bit as vulnerable to cyberattacks. The fact is there have been less cyberattacks against the US than in smaller European countries. Why? I think there’s this fear of mutually assured destruction because Americans are very capable of shutting down infrastructure in Russia,” said Prince.

To him, the most worrying was the Chinese attacks on American infrastructure: “Typically, they’re after intellectual property. With these attacks, it appears China is positioning itself for something in the future if and when the conflict begins.”

“Cyber defense is hard,” said Prince. “Whoever has the most data, the most information, is the one that wins these conflicts.”