Cybersecurity@CEPS Summit 2021 - DAY 2

Building Cyber Resilience for a sustainable Post Pandemic Recovery.

On 30 January 2020, the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a global health emergency, with the subsequent national lockdowns and travel bans forcing countries to quickly adapt to a fully virtual way of functioning. Fast forward nearly two years and our global interdependence and increasing reliance on digital technologies has never been more evident. Cyber criminals have managed to exploit the pandemic, leveraging the potential vulnerabilities of remote devices and bandwidth security.

In 2021, the drive for ubiquitous connectivity and digitalisation is a key component of supporting economic progress. Simultaneously and unavoidably, this drive also creates fertile ground for the rise in both scale and volume of cyberattacks that dominate our day-to-day lives: increasing ransomware and diversified tactics, increasingly mobile cyber threats, ever more sophisticated phishing, and cyber criminals and nation state attackers targeting civil infrastructures.

The European Commission has put great emphasis on its cybersecurity policy initiatives. These include the NIS2 Directive proposal, the Cybersecurity Industrial, Technology and Research Centre, the cybersecurity certification framework under the Cybersecurity Act and the creation of a Joint Cyber Unit to provide structured and coordinated operational cooperation that could include an EU-level mutual assistance mechanism during a major cyber crisis.

How can we build cyber resilience for a sustainable post-pandemic recovery?
How is the rapidly evolving threat landscape and the use of new technologies such as AI and quantum computing changing the approach to cyber resilience?
And what role could Europe play in global cybersecurity governance to build international support for drawing the line between responsible and irresponsible operations in cyberspace?