Exponential technologies create exciting future or cyber dystopia

The exponential growth of modern technology has brought abundant future possibilities, along with cybersecurity challenges," said Dr Victoria Baines, cybersecurity futurist.

So what are these cybersecurity challenges?

Project 30 a new series of videos   from Trend Micro,  a data security company, sketching out future scenarios, attempts to answer that question.

The company says, “By 2030, connectivity will impact every aspect of daily life, on both the physical and psychological levels. Malicious threat actors will evolve to use and abuse technological innovation – as they always do.”

And so, each scenario sketched out a possible future and the cyber challenge.

Scenarios include

• AI tools democratize cybercrime on a whole new scale to individuals with no technical skill
• Attacks cause chaos with supply chains and physical harm to humans through their cyber-implants
• Social engineering and misinformation become more visceral and harder to ignore when delivered via ubiquitous Heads Up Displays (HUDs)
• Massive IoT (MIoT) environments attract sabotage and extortion attacks targeting manufacturing, logistics, transportation, healthcare, education, retail, and the home environment
• AI-powered obfuscation makes attribution virtually impossible, pushing the security industry's focus towards incident response and IAM at the edge
• 5G and 6G connectivity everywhere drive more sophisticated and precise attacks
• "Everything as a Service" turns cloud providers into hugely lucrative targets for cyber-attackers
• Grey markets emerge for those that want tools to confound workplace monitoring
• Techno-nationalism becomes a key geostrategic tool of some of the world's most powerful nations, with the gulf between them and the have-nots widening further.

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Rik Ferguson, vice president of security for Trend Micro, said: “We hope this possible future will spark a debate within the security industry and wider society. Only by carefully anticipating future scenarios can we offer governments, businesses, and individuals a way to prepare for the cyber challenges of the coming decade."

Dr Victoria Baines concluded: "These scenarios and their associated threats will require changes to the business and regulation of cybersecurity. The cybersecurity industry must evolve both technology and training to prepare for a future in which everything is connected and at risk."