Opening the Black Hat Europe conference, founder Jeff Moss cited the 2010 attacks on Google as a point where attacks became more serious, as this enabled people in cybersecurity to “speak to a new audience.”
Looking back at 2018, Moss said that this year has felt like a new era with “new awareness.” Recalling the dot com boom and bust era, he explained that was when we put things on the internet and first began to realize the value of risk, and the rush to find security professionals “to protect before anything needed protecting.”
However, the attacks by China on Google in 2010 changed that, he claimed, saying that overnight it became acceptable to say that you had been hacked.
He added: “That enabled us to speak to a new audience, the media took us a bit more seriously and the world took us a bit more seriously, and that was really a 'before and after' event. I feel now that this is happening again on non-traditional topics.
“It feels like power and politics have entered our arena, it is not just law enforcement and organized crime, it feels like great powers are playing in our area and nation states with different agendas and different rules, are now playing in our backyard.”
Moss said that these are still our networks, but it now involves election meddling, fake news and propaganda, and social risks of giant social media platforms. These are not traditional issues for the industry to deal with “but we will be the ones being asked to fix it.”
He added that we are in a new era to provide advice and fix some of these issues, “and I think that is super exciting and super scary at the same time, but it is not like it was two years ago – there is an acceptance that we are in a new era.”
He concluded that while Google made it OK to talk about being attacked, election meddling in the US has made it OK to talk about cybersecurity and democracy, and also the harms of social media platforms.