I’m far from an authority on cybersecurity, but you don’t have to be an expert to understand the magnitude of what’s happening around the world. Intelligence capabilities and cyber skills are advancing to levels that represent a serious threat.
This has created fast-moving waters across the cyber landscape. All boats are accelerating in every direction. If you were sinking before (and honestly, only the truly elite among us weren’t sinking at some rate), you’re sinking much faster now.
Bailing helps. Fixing the holes in the boat, regardless of their size, is now mandatory. This was true last year, last week, yesterday and today. It’s just become more obvious to everyone. And more urgent.
It’s possible this is the new normal: new vulnerabilities discovered daily, constant uncertainty, and periodic panic. Maybe it is. But I think a more likely scenario is that we’re in a period of whiplash. We’re accelerating into a new, AI-powered velocity of cyber rapids. As we learn to navigate these much faster, more treacherous waters, we’ll eventually find a new balance. That balance will demand more rigour, and security will need to be understood much more broadly across every function of a business.
At these speeds, with these waves and rocks, even the least technical passengers can see that we’re no longer drifting in the tranquillity of a safe harbour. Stuff is getting real out here. Rocks and whirlpools are everywhere. They’ll swallow you whole if you’re casual about your lines, your speed, or your ability to navigate.
This puts a tax on every business hosting digital assets on the public internet. Businesses will need to upgrade their boats, procedures, training and expectations. That won’t be cheap. But it should result in a safer internet overall. It just might not feel that way while we adjust.
Trust is another area where the pressure is building. Insurance costs are likely to rise. Customers will ask harder questions. And the trust that was once established by a casual reference from a sales or customer support representative to an ISO certification or a security page will take much more effort to earn. Exactly what that looks like remains unclear. But expectations are rising. Fast.
What I’m less sure about is whether the boats themselves are fundamentally incompatible with the demands of these new waters. Over the past several decades, we’ve moved from the more decentralised computing environments of the 1980s and 1990s towards the centralised cloud architectures that have dominated since the 2000s. Some have argued for a return to decentralisation through crypto, but that vision has largely remained on the margins of mainstream enterprise architecture. Even within a cloud-based world, certain deployment patterns can concentrate risk in ways we may not have fully appreciated.
I expect we’ll see many stakeholders revisit the technical decisions made over the past 20 years through a new security lens. Whether that leads to fundamental architectural changes remains to be seen. Maybe the boats are fine. Maybe they need rebuilding. Or maybe we’ve been asking them to carry too much, for too long, without properly accounting for the conditions ahead.
I don’t know. But today, it’s clear even to the most casual passengers that something has changed.
Lifejackets on.
Photo by Marvin Tendies on Unsplash.