Financial Times | May 16 2017:
The ransomware attack shows that the internet’s age of innocence is over.
The other evening I saw part of the 1969 film The Italian Job and it set me thinking. Not about the balance of payments, the Common Market or avoiding a cliff edge — all of which feature in that classic movie — but about how much robbing a bank has changed. When I was growing up this was an activity involving “blaggers” with stockings on their heads brandishing sawn-off shotguns.
Today robbing a bank has never been a more un-kinetic activity: the crooks have enlisted the geeks in the equivalent of a cyber smash-and-grab spree. And with cyber crime rising at a faster rate than the use of the internet, the capacity for it to touch the daily lives of us all has never been greater. Malware, ransomware and phishing have become the criminal’s tools of the trade. Friday’s global ransom attack, which hit, among targets in 150 countries, British hospitals, the German railway network, Spanish telecoms, US logistics giant FedEx and the Russian interior ministry, perhaps marks a turning point in public awareness.
Last week the European Commission published the midterm review of the EU’s digital single market, providing a snapshot of the progress made in the past two years towards creating the right conditions for Europe’s digitally powered and enabled future. The DSM has the potential to unlock €415bn of growth annually and to revolutionise the way we work, shop and live. But as well as the advantages, we need to be clear-eyed about the accompanying risks. That is why the commission will be proposing an update of the EU’s 2013 cyber security strategy. Four years may not sound like long ago, but in cyber terms it is a lifetime. So while much of the current strategy remains relevant, the focus needs to be on broadening it to include detection and deterrence.
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