A COVID-Like Cyberattack: How a Cyber Pandemic Could Spread

The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken our economies and societies to the core and shown us how vulnerable we are to biological threats.

In the digital world, similar risks are being overlooked right now.

A cyber attack with COVID-like characteristics would spread faster and further than any biological virus.

Its reproductive rate would be around ten times greater than what we've experienced with the coronavirus. To give you an idea, one of the fastest worms in history, the two thousand and three Slammer Sapphire worm, doubled in size approximately every eight point five seconds, infecting over

seventy-five thousand devices in ten minutes and almost eleven million devices in twenty-four hours.

Fortunately, at least until now, cyber attacks have not impacted our health the way pandemics have, but the economic damages, and therefore the impact they have had on our daily lives, have been equal and sometimes even greater. You see, the only way to stop the exponential

propagation of a COVID-like cyber threat is to fully disconnect the millions of vulnerable devices from one another and from the internet, all of this in a matter of days. A single day without the internet would cost our economies more than fifty billion US dollars, and that's before

considering the economic and societal damages should these devices be linked to essential services such as transport or healthcare.

As the digital realm increasingly merges with our physical world, the ripple effects of cyber attacks on our safety just keep on expanding at a faster pace than what we're preparing for.

COVID-19 was known as an anticipated risk.

So is the digital equivalent. Let's be better prepared for that one.

The time is now.