International cooperation in the area of cyber security and expertise exchanging to tackle the perils of ever sophisticating cyber threats were the focus of one of today’s conferences as part of the World Economic Forum 2023 in Davos, Switzerland, with participants also discussing the Global Cybersecurity Outlook based on earlier research and cooperation.
The report includes the findings of the latest research from the World Economic Forum on how the world is responding to cyber threats and what leaders can do to secure their organisations in the year to come.
Prime Minister Edi Rama shared Albania’s experience in facing the cyberattack last year, saying collaboration among countries to best harness technology and shape a common, swift and successful response to the cyber threats is of a paramount importance.
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-Prime Minister Rama, we see these expectations for a catastrophic cyber event from 95% from leaders in the world’s cyber sector. Albania has been at the centre of a cyber attack. What lessons can we take away from this experience, particularly for the political leaders?
Prime Minister Edi Rama: Thank you for having me here! I will try to b helpful. First of all, because of the event you just mentioned, we were forced and obliged to start and learn more about that and one of the facts I learned was is that if cyber crime would be a state, it would have been the third global economy after U.S. and China.
In 2015, its overall potential is estimated at around three trillion dollars, whereas in 2025 this potential is projected to jump to over 10.5 trillion dollars. So if we think back in terms of one virus, namely the COVID-19 that triggered such a chaos and disruption and needed so much interaction and so much common efforts, let’s imagine an exponential multitude of viruses that mutate every day exponentially – while threatening not our body, but the very bodies we live in, our organizations, our countries, our systems – then it could just be the apocalypse. It is about viruses that can block and paralyze not only our way of living, but also can control it and can deviate it. So they can use our systems like – God forbid it – our air transport systems to hit us back.
Just imagine if a cyber attack is launched on our air transport systems that would turn a huge number of commercial flying airplanes into bombs.
What we learned is that this is something that it is absolutely naïve to think that every country, regardless of being poor, being powerful or not, can tackle it on its own. This is because what we are seeing during our daily struggle, we are under attack from Iran since last summer (and it would complicated for the audience to explain why, but we are under attack and we have joined a coalition of several friendly nations facing the same threat coming from the same source and they are much developed countries than us in terms of the cyber defense) and it is these weapons, if I may use this word, but they are real weapons, codes used to attack us and these codes are something new even for our allies. It is also a way to learn what new weapons are being used for on daily bases so that we can prepare against them.
I can’t imagine how the institutional world, be either the public or private sectors, can survive it without being part of a very large coalition.
So what we learn from the conventional crime in Europe is that the conventional crime has created a much more functioning EU than the states themselves, because they are very much more interconnected, they need no never ending summits and meetings, they don’t exercise the veto rights to stop them from doing anything, whereas, in the meantime, the EU itself has to struggle to create convergences and to create cohesion in launching common actions.
We already witnessed it during the pandemic. To conclude, I would say that there is another aspect too. On one hand, this is truly challenging to the public sector, because it is a matter or resources. Just imagine Albania, its GDP and its development as the country has now made an exponential step to be transformed from a country that was very much based on the paperwork and bureaucratic procedures and bribe practice, into a country that now delivers 95% of its public services online, which is a technology bless for the undeveloped countries to take steps forward that would otherwise take decades, but on the other hand it is also a curse of technology, because you are totally exposed to a power like Iran, which is definitely not something we can match in terms of finances, in terms of ruthlessness, antidemocratic conduct and so on and so forth, and therefore we need now to invest a lot more. For the government to invest in what will happen is one thing, but investing in what should not happen is another thing, because in the end we have to be elected.
The question is how much the world would come together, how much the countries would come together, how much big and small countries, rich and not rich countries will realize the need for each other, because if not for anything else, Albania now is a very important laboratory to figure out what’s next.
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-My question is for Mr. Edi Rama. Can you share with us, those who haven’t followed too closely the attack, some of the concrete impact your country experienced and what was your quickest response you were able to deliver against the attack?
Prime Minister Edi Rama: I avoided it during my introduction, because it would be complicated in terms of the time in our disposal. You can be late in the beginning in Davos, but you shouldn’t be late in concluding, because others will have to get this very room.
So I would try to explain and make it as short as possible. What we have done is that we have considered technology as our lifesaving boat as we endeavor to move from a level of administration, which was very much contaminated with the endemic corruption, in terms of bribery, to a level where the direct contact between the citizens and public servants and the state offices was eliminated through online interaction. This way we succeeded to become from a country that was really in the bottom in this aspect to a country that is now ranked eighth in Europe and 16th or 17th worldwide according to the UN chart in terms of digital public services.
And it is exactly where the perpetrators of the cyberattack aimed to hurt us by practically seeking to completely wipe out our digital infrastructure and to completely delete our data in terms of the public services.
It was extremely disturbing, because for several weeks it was an incredible war taking place on the web, with many people engaged in “the tranches “ 24 /7 to repel the attack and we succeeded to survive this attack by not letting them do what they were supposed to do.
And then through a very thorough forensic we conducted together with the Microsoft’s threat intelligence team and the FBI team and others we reached the conclusion that it was absolutely clear that behind this attack was a state, namely Iran. We attributed the attack to Iran based on facts.
And the other side of the scary presence of the cyber crime in our lives is that it is not like someone, an intruder entering your house by breaking the door or the window to do so. They could be in your house and you are now aware of the fact that they are there.
So, it is about intrusions and at the same time they are like ticking bombs, programming the day and the moment when such a bomb would go off. Until then, you might not be aware at all of the fact that you are sleeping on a bomb.
What we are doing today, as I already said, together with two other friendly countries, is exactly that; we are detecting, also thanks to their much higher expertise, they are detecting exactly what are the movements in the dark that otherwise nobody would be aware of.
We are very much preoccupied to raise the awareness of the private sector about the danger and make the private sector cooperate and interact with the government also in terms of contributions.
It is not an easy exercise at all, but it is the new world and that’s why I hope that the prophetic sentence by Michel Rocard won’t prove itself to be true in the long run. Before dying he said: “I feel blessed I lived in a time when internet was born and I feel blessed that I am leaving this world before the internet destroys it.”
