Muhammad Khurram Khan, Founder & CEO, Global Foundation for Cyber Studies and Research – USA & King Saud University – Saudi Arabia.
Talking about cybercrime in the digital economy, how can we reach a resilient, safe and peaceful cyberspace?
We are living in a modern technological era in which everything is becoming a computer. The connectivity computing power and intelligence of everyday objects are sitting in a new way now, which is providing extensible features to perform. A smartphone is no longer just a phone, but a computer, which could do anything. Everything has a connectivity and intelligence to make decisions on their own. The World Economic Forum every year publishes reports to manifest global risk, which are faced by the word. This year (16th edition), they have categorized five global critical ways, which include economic, environmental geopolitical societal and technological risk.
One of the top 10 ways in terms of likelihood is cyber security, which is ranked at number nine, while on the other hand, one of the top 10 risk in terms of impact is IT infrastructure breakdown, which is ranked at number 10, and that makes our hyper connected world quite scary.
So, the problem with any digital economy is that it is too fragile; as far as cybersecurity is concerned, a serious kind of cyber-attack could cripple down the whole economy. Threat actors in the cyber space could be a person, a hacker, for example, an organized group, or an entity with the aim to influence the cyber assets. In our hyper connected world, the impact of cybercrime is devastating the global social economic system.
How can we convert cybercrime ecosystem and address prevailing challenges?
There is a need to build a global strategic framework and ecosystem for Cybersecurity Awareness, and cyber hygiene practices to protect the masses from cyber criminals and online risk.
And it is also imperative to launch academic on training programs to prepare a skilled cyber workforce and establish capacity and capability building around the world.
These academic programs should be, you know, strengthened by establishing world-class research and development to spur innovation, promote entrepreneurship and growth. In addition, there is also the need to collaborate aggregator transnational cyber-crimes and combat criminal organizations, by dark web monitoring Open Source Intelligence and crime against children and women.