Menaces cyber et bien-être numérique : Ondrej Vlcek, PDG d'Avast, fait le point

It is still very much a growing segment. Cyber attacks are at an all-time high and they have been on an upward trajectory for, I don't know, 20 years, as long as I can remember. We are here at Viva to actually introduce our first digital well-being report, in which we talk about the correlation between digital freedom — that is comparing countries and looking at their digital freedom — with the likelihood of people in those countries actually getting attacked. And what this clearly shows is that the less free a country is when it comes to internet freedom or digital freedom, the more likely people in that country are actually getting attacked or hacked, which I think is really interesting.

People usually when they look at news today, they see tanks and bombs and missiles, so they see the connected kinetic part of the war. But in fact, behind the scenes, there is a cyber war happening as well. So both Russia and Ukraine and other parts of the world are involved in some sort of cyber attacks and cyber espionage and other things that are absolutely happening, even though I think some people expected this to have a much larger effect when it comes to critical infrastructure. For example, some people predicted that if there was a new war, especially in Europe, it would immediately knock out the power grid because of cyber attacks, or it would immediately somehow take down news stations and radio and all mass communication, which did not happen. But still, strategically and tactically, I think for those countries it is extremely important to have both protective measures — that is, be on the defensive side because they are under constant attack — as well as actually leverage cyber for the offensive side. In some ways, I think the interesting thing here is that if you compare the approach that Russia is taking to the approach that Ukraine is taking, it's actually quite different. In Ukraine, it's very decentralized, very kind of self-controlling, autonomous small units that do their own operations, while in Russia it's very centrally managed. You've got Putin and then a layer below him and a layer below these people, and everything including cyber attacks is being centrally managed and centrally organized, which doesn't seem to be working very well for them, which is a good thing. But it's just an interesting observation that we saw here.

It is still very much a growing segment. Cyber attacks are at an all-time high and they have been on an upward trajectory for, I don't know, 20 years, as long as I can remember. Now, finally, the question about ransomware — actually a bit of a nuance here. In fact, in the first half of this year, especially in the second quarter, the global amount of ransomware attacks actually decreased slightly. And the reason for that is that, funnily enough, many of these attacks were coming from Russia or from Ukraine, and since these two countries are now kind of busy with other things, especially fighting against each other, the impact outside of these two countries is actually smaller than it was like a year ago. But in general, it definitely continues to grow. Data breaches are on the rise, identity theft is on the rise, and there are many other categories that are still growing double or even triple digit year on year.

We started of course with antivirus, then we extended broader to cyber security more generally, including phishing and social engineering type of attacks, protection against those. Then we extended it further to privacy. So privacy became a really big theme for people, especially in Europe but also in other parts of the world, maybe six or seven years ago. So we added VPN and anti-tracking product. And then the next frontier for us, which we believe is hugely impactful, is digital identity. The thing that we are seeing today on the internet, if you think about it, many of the problems of today's internet, including misinformation, including what is happening on social media, etc., is basically caused by the fact that there are a lot of bots and a lot of AI actually happening without strong authorization or authentication. There are no real humans behind these algorithms, it's just bots that are participating. So if we could create a strong enough digital identity system that would work globally or at least in a country, then clearly that would help solve these problems both on the security side as well as on the privacy side. So the two investments that we made with Evername and Security get us closer. They provide us with some foundational technology, but then of course it will be up to us to use that technology and give it to those hundreds and hundreds of millions of users that we have in the Avast family and go beyond that. And that's what I think is really, really exciting.

I would like to end on an optimistic note, because we talk about cyber attacks, we talk about the war, we talk about all sorts of problems. But in general, I actually do think that technology is moving us forward. Despite all these attacks, I would say that we are actually better than what we were 10 years ago or 20 years ago. So in general, even though it's not easy and people are more and more sophisticated in their attacks, things are moving in the right direction.