Prime Minister Edi Rama is attending the World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting 2023 in the town of Davos, Switzerland, a three – day event from 16 to 20 January that includes several sessions.
The World Economic Forum is the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation that engages the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.
Securing Critical Infrastructure was the title of one of the sessions, with Prime Minister Rama and other participants discussing cybersecurity issues and ways how business and political leaders can mobilize a collective response to safeguard critical assets and mitigate systemic damage as hybrid attacks become increasingly more sophisticated.
In his remarks, Prime Minister said:
“In the last six or seven years only, we succeeded 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 web-based public services only. One no longer needs to report to state offices, encounter endless bureaucratic procedures and so and so forth in order to gain a public service. This has definitely helped a lot and we are improving it constantly.
However, the transition from the bureaucratic paperwork procedures to the online public services has exposed us a lot. Last year we were massively attacked and severely attacked by Iran. Of course we paid utmost attention in every step of a thorough investigation we conducted together with the Microsoft’s threat intelligence team and the FBI team and others before we reached the fact-based conclusion that a state was behind this attack and we are still under attack, practically on daily basis.
Somehow, the technology blessing also made us to realize the other side of it, namely the curse of technology.
However, although we haven’t put state-of-the-art cybersecurity systems in place yet, we managed to prevent complete deletion of the systems we had built and practically prevented data loss and data hacking from happening although this was the goal of the attack.
We resisted successfully if taking the aggressors’ goal into account. The report, which was completely autonomous and independent from the Albanian government, clearly showed that the ultimate goal of the perpetrators was to completely erase our systems and send us back to the stone age.
It the cybercrime was to be a state it would have been the world’s largest third economy after the United States and China.
I very much hope that countries around the world won’t make the very same mistake they did during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic by hastily imposing self-isolation and avoiding real time cooperation, because this is a pandemic with a risk exponentially higher than the real pandemic and damage could be apocalyptical.
