TIRANA, Jan 18 /ATA/ – By I. Vata/ Prime Minister Edi Rama participated in the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland entitled: “Global Cyber Security Outlook 2023 – cooperation between countries in response to cyber threats.”
Cooperation between countries in the field of cyber security, as well as the exchange of experiences in dealing with increasingly sophisticated cyber threats, were the topics of one of today’s conferences at the World Economic Forum Davos 2023, with special focus on the report of Cyber Security Outlook 2023, which is based on previous research and collaboration.
The report includes the results of new research on how leaders are responding to cyber threats now and offers recommendations on what leaders can do to secure their countries in the coming year.
In his remarks, Rama shared with the participants Albania’s experience in dealing with cyber attacks, as well as the importance of cooperation between countries to make the best use of technology and to shape a common, prompt and successful response to cyber threats.
“We see catastrophic cyber event expectations from 95% of world leaders. Albania has been at the heart of a cyber attack. What takeaway can we get from this experience, especially for political leaders”, emphasized Rama.
“I will try to be concise. First, because of the event you mentioned, we were forced to start learning more about it, and one of the facts I learned was that if cybercrime were a country, it would be the third largest global economy after USA and China. In 2015 total potential was estimated at 3 trillion USD, in 2025 it is predicted to be 10.5 trillion. If we were to think in terms of a virus, Covid-19, that inflicted so much chaos and required so much interaction and so much joint effort, let’s imagine an exponential multitude of viruses, which every day mutate exponentially – they do not threaten our organism, but the organism we live in, our organizations, our countries, our systems – then the end may simply be an apocalypse. They are viruses that, not only can paralise our way of life, but can control it and can divert it, so they can use our systems like remote, air transport systems to attack us. Imagine if there is a cyber attack on air transport systems that turns a number of flying planes into bombs,” said Rama.
Rama drew attention to Iran’s cyber attack on Albania and the cooperation between the countries.
“What we have learned is that it is very naive to think that any country, be it poor or powerful, rich or not, can address it alone. What we are seeing in our daily battle, we are under attack since last summer from Iran, (it would be complicated to explain why to the audience, but we are under attack and we are a coalition with several friendly countries that face the same threat coming from the same source that are more developed than us in terms of cyber defense) is that these weapons, I’m using this word because they are real weapons, they are logs and codes that are used to attack us , constitute innovation for our allies as well. Which means that cooperation is also a way to learn what new weapons are used every day and to prepare against them.
Also, Rama asked the countries to cooperate in the fight against cyber attacks. He emphasized that the EU should try to create convergences and cohesions in order to take a joint action.
Prime Minister Rama also answered questions about Albania’s response to cyber attacks.
Asked about the concrete impacts and consequences on Albania from this attack and what was the fastest answer that the country could give, Rama said that, “I skipped this in the introduction because it would be complicated for the time we have available. In Davos you can start late, but you can’t finish late because there are others who have to come and take the floor.”
“I will try to speak in brief. What we have done is that we have considered technology as the lifeboat to go from a level of administration that was quite affected by endemic corruption, in terms of bribery, to a level where direct contact between citizens and public servants and offices was eliminated through online interaction. We managed to move from a country that was really at the bottom in this regard to a country that is ranked eighth in Europe and 16-17th in the world according to the United Nations for countries using digital services. But that’s exactly where the hackers wanted to hit us, practically aiming to completely disable our digital infrastructure and completely delete our data related to public services,” he said.
“Through a very thorough analysis with the assistance of Microsoft’s counter-threat team and the FBI team we concluded that it was absolutely clear that one country was behind this attack, specifically Iran. This is an attack we attributed to Iran based on facts. The flip side of cyber crime’s terrifying presence in our lives is that it’s not the same as someone breaking into your house, breaking down your door or smashing a window, and getting in. Cyber criminals can be in your home and you don’t know you have them.”
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