07/08/21

Episode 64

Cyber Polygon 2021 – The World Economic Forum Simulation

The World Economic Forum (WEF) will stage a ‘cyber attack exercise’ to prepare for a “potential cyber pandemic”, that founder Klaus Schwab says will be worse than the current crisis.

Cyber Polygon combines the world’s largest technical training for corporate teams and an online conference featuring senior officials from international organisations and leading corporations. Every year, the training brings together a wide range of global businesses and government structures, while the live stream gathers millions of spectators from across the world. This year, the event is taking a bit of a more serious tone, given uncertainties in the world.

According to the WEF, COVID-19 was known as an ‘anticipated risk’, and so is its digital equivalent. “A cyber attack with COVID-like characteristics would spread faster and farther than any biological virus. Its reproductive rate would be around 10 times greater than what we’ve experienced with the coronavirus.” — Klaus Schwab

We will have to wait until the forum begins to understand exactly what context this cyber attack is based on, or what the ‘anticipated’ results could potentially be, but we can make some assumptions. Of course, we have spoken of food systems breaking down due to COVID-19 restrictions (see Rockefeller’s Future Reset Forum) and also concepts contained in the (delayed) Great Reset forum. However, it seems while these are specific systems that may be encompassed in a massive cyber attack of ecosystems — food and economy — this forum will tackle the larger issue of a digital world. This will follow on from the 2020 Summit, in which they made the case for why having digital identities was actually necessary to prevent a cyber pandemic.

This year’s forum will discuss the cyber attack itself, which is the problem that will arise. So, if this is the case, what could this type of problem look like in an inter-connected, digital world? In 2015, one of the “fathers of the Internet”, Vint Cerf, caused a stir when he expressed concern that today’s digital world might be lost forever. If technology continues to outpace preservation or security tactics, the present could be disrupted and future citizens could be locked out of a digital world – plunged into a “digital dark age”.

“The key message voiced by experts at WEF and other international platforms is that supply chain security is to become a major cybersecurity issue in 2021,” Sberbank stated. “The ever-expanding digitalization tightens the interconnectivity between people, devices, companies and countries. Thus, the resilience of an entire system depends on the ability of each link within a chain to withstand threats of various grades.”

The website ominously warns that “a single vulnerable link is enough to bring down the entire system, just like the domino effect”, adding that “Cyber Polygon 2021 will enable the spectators and participants to improve on their cyber literacy, enhance the resilience of their organizations and learn to repel cyberthreats on all levels.”

Cyber Polygon 2021 is the annual continuation of last year’s Cyber Polygon 2020 event, which included Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, and participants like WEF founder Klaus Schwab, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, and about 20 other members of the political elite. Notably, one of the presenters was Stéphane Duguin, CEO of the CyberPeace Institute, which is funded by Microsoft, Facebook and Mastercard, among others. The institute claims to help customers “increase digital resilience and the capacity to respond to and recover from cyberattacks.”