By Lilia Guan
The minister for foreign affairs, Kevin Rudd flew to Munich to attend the 48th Munich Security Conference (MSC), to discuss a range of issues affecting the security of countries today.
The topics range from; the security rise of Asia; the situation in Syria; security implications of the financial crisis; building a new Middle East; and cyber security.
Mr Rudd said in a press statement that cyber security and the impact an attack could have negative effects on the economic stability of a country.
“One cyber security attack has the potential to cripple an economy in hours,” he said.
“Cyber security is one of the most challenging security threats now facing nations and businesses across the world.”
During his first ever attendance at the event, chairman and chief executive officer of Kaspersky, Eugene Kaspersky said the world was living in interesting times.
The generation before was living without the internet like this generation and the next generation will not understand a world without digital communication, the Internet and mobile, Mr Kaspersky said during his webcast.
“Our mission is to develop the internet in a safe with secure networks,” he said.
“First of all cyber crime, finally everyone understands that it’s a huge problem and even government are talking about it.
“Second of all there are two huge organisations that want to be responsible for fighting it.”
Mr Kaspersky said the Actions Against Terrorist Unit (a department of the United Nations) has an impact and as an organisation “it seems it works quite well”.
He says secondly Interpol (international police organisation), plans to open a cyber Interpol division office in Singapore in 2014.
During his talk, Mr Kaspersky said hacktivists were committing very serious online disruptions.
“They can hack anything they want and they can stop countries,” he said.
“The most dangerous thinking is that these hacktivists will transform into cyber terrorists.”
Mr Kaspersky said the internet isn’t a new place it’s just a different place and to remember the history/old times of how humans behaved in new environments.
“Humans behave the same way and will always [go back to] [behaving] in the old way, in a new environment,” he said.
“That’s why doing something about hacktivists is extremely important.”
Mr Kasperksy said hacktivists shouldn’t be mistaken for cyber espionage – which can be done by an individual or state government.
“Sometimes it’s not easy to recognise who did it, espionage was here before the internet,” he said.
“I see it as more of a technical problem of protection.”
However Mr Kaspersky said cyber wars a very bad idea with the worst case scenario being the unpredictable damage it can cause a nation.
“We don’t know how deep we are involved with the internet and we don’t know how deep we depend on IT and how IT systems are involved with our lives,” he says.
“[Cyber weapons are] easy to develop and deploy. In internet there’s no distance or time and someone in Latin American or Asia can just press a button and a few seconds later [an attack] [can] happen here.
“I’m afraid if there is an era of cyber war the main victims will be developed countries, because in these in these countries they depend on IT, computers and on networks much more than other countries.”
Mr Kaspersky said there’s a need on an international scale for capital agreements to stop this before it happens - much like nuclear weapon agreements.
“If we don’t do it then I’m afraid for the future of my kids.”
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