Embattled Companies, States Should Join Forces Against Cyber Attacks

Posted: May 30th, 2017

By Karl Lallerstedt

Karl Lallerstedt is the senior advisor for security policy at the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise. Lallerstedt is also co-founder of Black Market Watch, program director for Illicit Trade, Financial and Economic Crime at the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime, and a member member of the OECD Task Force on Countering Illicit Trade. Formerly, he was the anti-illicit trade strategy director at a leading multinational corporation, steering committee member of the International Chamber of Commerce’s Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting and Piracy, and a political and economic analyst for the Department of State, Oxford Analytica and the Economist Intelligence Unit.

We are living in a new era, with unprecedented industrial scale theft of intellectual property and company secrets. The most recent example is a vast cyber espionage campaign, dubbed Operation Cloud Hopper, made public this April. In this global campaign, a China based group targeted IT service providers, thereby obtaining access to their clients in multiple industrial sectors and enabling them to steal proprietary data belonging to businesses in North America, Western Europe, and East Asia.

Earlier this year, the Swedish National Defence Radio Establishment, the Swedish Security Service, and the Finnish Security Intelligence Service released their annual reports. They all confirm a “new normal” in the Nordic region. Industry is under continuous attack, with state-sponsored actors stealing research and development material and other industrial secrets. According to the Swedish National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA), sophisticated cyber-attacks, with advanced code that can be attributed to states or state-sponsored groups, have increased. Tens of thousands of activities involving malicious code attributable to state actors tracked by the FRA are detected every month.

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