The cyber range is a project of the World Economic Forum and was compared to event 201, which apparently wrote the script for the COVID-19 pandemic. Cyber Polygon focuses on the response in the case of a global cyber attack where hackers turn off large parts of the Internet.
According to the WEF website;
This year, discussions during the live broadcast conference will focus on the safe development of ecosystems. As global digitalisation accelerates further, and people, companies, and countries become increasingly interconnected, the security of each individual element of the supply chain is key to ensuring the sustainability of the entire system.
During the technical exercise, participants will hone their practical skills in mitigating a targeted supply chain attack on the corporate ecosystem in real time.
Mark Zuckerberg attended WEF meetings in Davos, Switzerland, and yet Facebook is not a major player in the global supply chain. However, the several-hour break the other day caused fear and panic in the hearts of its 2.8 billion users. Now, in one day, the whole world understands the dangers of a massive cyber attack.
This article now links Facebook’s global decline to a potential Pearl Harbor-like attack carried out on Big Tech. It concludes: “Unregulated and without checks and balance in their actions, Big Tech could be a threat to the West; this discovery is one of the important lessons of the recent break-up.”
The impressive trajectory of internet development and the dominance of social networks in the way we get our information showed its vulnerability on Monday night when Facebook and its companies - Instagram and WhatsApp - crashed around the world.
Large parts of the world rely on these platforms and services, which governments generally do not regulate, but do everything: send messages, make calls, receive information and coordinate meetings and daily life.
This is not just a small part of people's lives in the modern age. The age of the Internet has quickly shifted power into the hands of several major technology giants who act as monopolies in hosting, distributing and disseminating information.
However, they also control other networks that are increasingly serving as a substitute for telephone networks.
When the age of the Internet began in the 1990s, it gave people a radically new way to access information; before that there was only television and radio. The nature of the Web, interactive in a way that the other two did not, meant that it quickly began to populate a multitude of places in human lives that had not hitherto been considered possible.
Soon after, the Internet offered an alternative way of watching television - streaming sites and YouTube. This quickly became true for radio and other media. The news began to be broadcast on the Internet, reducing the influence of the major conventional media and calling into question their survival. Product sales - shopping - have moved to the internet, as well as creating portals for chatting, messaging and communication and for creating virtual versions of yourself.
The latest revolution has been connecting these different elements under the auspices of big technology companies - like Facebook. This means that while the Internet era of the late 1990s and early 2000s was uniquely free for the entire Wild West, the new era more reflects the era of Robber Barons (unscrupulous industrialists) in the U.S. in the late 19th century - monopolies and companies which dominate the industry through horizontal and vertical integration.
The big technology companies are so big that they have now swallowed the entire Internet and controlled the flow of most information and communications.
A fall like the one that happened on Monday is not unprecedented. Various major technology sites have crashed in the past, usually for a short time. Also, the number of cyber incidents has increased in recent years, including cyber attacks targeting critical infrastructure, whether in Israel, the United States or elsewhere.
The question that governments should increasingly ask is how they can replicate or maintain communication and large internet systems in the event of a network failure among large companies that are too big to fail.
This is not an arbitrary thought experiment.
The world is entering an era of uncertainty, which is reflected not only in the pandemic, but also in the competition of great powers. This is because the world order that emerged after the Cold War, which led to the global domination of the United States, has now moved into a league of authoritarian countries that are at odds with Washington and Western democracies.
Most of them also censor certain parts of the Internet or are afraid of widespread use by citizens as a whole. This includes Turkey, Iran, China, Russia and other countries.
Large technology companies often have to weigh the demands of authoritarian regimes to overcome them, balancing them with their budgets and business goals. This means, in some cases, succumbing to authoritarians.
Khalisah/TechnocracyNews