Preventing Cyberbiosecurity Threats and Protecting Vulnerable Countries
The current pandemic provides states and terrorist groups with a real-time window into societies’ strengths and weaknesses in emergency situations. The past months have shown how a biological threat could break down hospitals and food supply chains, shatter citizens’ trust in critical information and public institutions, and bring social unrest, disinformation, even violence.
Additionally, malicious actors’ capacity to access cloud-labs could automate the design of pathogens with multidrug resistance or reproduce a strain similar to COVID-19. Both could be easily spread in public spaces using drone technologies.
2. Eroding Digital Trust
As they converge, emerging technologies create growing interdependence between cyber-, bio- and human security threats. In the context of the COVID-19 crisis, the interdependence of medical facilities and biotech supply chains on energy companies, data-centers and information networks produces severe vulnerabilities. The combination of medical data-manipulation and cyberattacks on bio-manufacturing could have drastic economic consequences and lethal outcomes for populations. Yet the most enduring harm would be on citizens’ trust – trust in public health institutions, emergency data-systems, laboratories, hospitals and critical infrastructures.
3. Converging Risks in Conflicts
Conflict-affected states, when facing converging security threats, suffer crises unprecedented in magnitude, mortality and scope. These states are less able to prepare for low-probability, high-impact events at a time of public health emergency, and will be less resilient should one materialize. In a country where critical infrastructure is already failing, for instance, a cyberattack on medical facilities or connected electrical grid could be devastating. Even in wealthy countries cybercriminals have targeted hospitals and digital networks during the COVID-19 crisis, scaling up social engineering strategies to prey on people at a vulnerable time.
Looking Ahead and Preventing the Next Crisis
Current threats in sectors like biosecurity or cybersecurity are governed in silos. To affect change, new collaborations will be key. A panel of government, private sector and technology leaders could be convened to conduct combined foresight analyses across technological domains, including AI, cyber- and biosecurity. With an aim toward understanding the convergence of high-impact biological events with dual-use technologies, this group could define a shared approach to prevention and mitigation.
Foresight efforts should include cooperation with states affected by conflict. Experts in conflict prevention should partner with private sector actors and civil society to better tailor prevention strategies to the specific threats and ethical needs of vulnerable communities. Such efforts have already begun to emerge. For instance, start-ups and innovators at the UN and the Alan Turing Institute already collaborate to use AI for crowd-sourcing and forecasting emerging security risks.
Such “inclusive foresight” could equip countries and agencies with the tools to articulate scenarios from which risk prioritization can emerge, particularly for conflict zones and develop responsible approaches to leverage emerging technologies for prevention.
“Converging security risks have powerful and corrosive impacts on peace and human well-being,” WEF says. “The multilateral system needs to learn from this unprecedented crisis and prepare for its repeat, with more deadly consequences and high potential for weaponization. Foresight, used as a leadership strategy, can help avoid ethical and governance failures.”
