DUBAI: The cybersecurity ecosystem has grown more complex with implications for both organizations and governments, according to the World Economic Forum’s latest “Global Cybersecurity Outlook” report released on Monday.
Sixty-six percent of organizations expect artificial intelligence to have a major impact on cybersecurity in 2025. But only 37 percent of organizations have processes in place to assess the security of AI tools before deployment, the report found.
Akshay Joshi, head of the WEF’s Centre for Cybersecurity, told Arab News: “Geopolitical uncertainties, advances in emerging technologies and supply chain vulnerabilities are among the key factors contributing to complexity in cyberspace, all of which point to the need for building cyber resilience across organizations and nations.”
The report calls for a shift in perspective from cybersecurity to cyber resilience, which it describes as an organization’s ability to mitigate the impact of significant cyber incidents on its goals and objectives.
Supply-chain challenges are the greatest barrier to achieving cyber resilience due to their increasing complexity, along with lack of visibility and oversight into the security levels of suppliers, according to the report.
Over half (54 percent) of large organizations consider supply-chain challenges as the greatest barrier to achieving cyber resilience.
Another significant factor is geopolitical tensions, which affect the cybersecurity strategy of nearly 60 percent of organizations surveyed in the report.
Geopolitics also affect risk perception with 45 percent of cyber leaders saying they are concerned about disruption of operations and business processes. And approximately 33 percent of CEOs say cyber espionage, loss of sensitive information and intellectual property theft are their top concerns.
There is widespread disparity regionally and economically when it comes to cyber resilience. For example, 35 percent of small organizations believe their cyber resilience is inadequate — a proportion that has increased sevenfold since 2022.
On the other hand, the share of large organizations reporting insufficient cyber resilience has nearly halved since 2022 down from 13 percent to 7 percent.
Regionally, only 15 percent of respondents in Europe and North America lack confidence in their country’s ability to respond to major cyber incidents targeting critical infrastructure. But this number rises to 36 percent in Africa and 42 percent in Latin America.
The Middle East region is more optimistic with respondents saying they are “confident” (36 percent) and “very confident” (36 percent).
“This confidence is a result of the unequivocal focus on cybersecurity in the Kingdom and across the wider region coupled with the importance given to global collaborative efforts,” Joshi explained.
In addition to these insights, the report highlighted the economic implications of cybersecurity and the role of leadership in prioritizing it as a core business enabler.
It also stressed the need for collaborative efforts to secure networks essential to the digital economy and for ways to effectively address the increasing shortage of cybersecurity skills.
