Ds the beginning of the war, on February 24, 2022, in Ukraine, cyber appeared as a new zone of conflict – in addition to military, diplomatic and economic grounds – with the fear of a “cyber Pearl Harbor” which could have plunged the world into a new form of digital warfare and exposed the global economy to the risk of a cyber-induced economic crisis. More than three months later, where are we with cyber risk?
Cyber risk is defined as the combination of the probability of occurrence of cyber incidents (malicious incidents or not, which jeopardize the cybersecurity of an information system or breach security procedures and rules) and their impact. Cyber risk is inherently difficult to measure and quantify given the illegal nature of cyber attacks and their multiple forms.
This risk can, in fact, affect any individual victim of the theft of their personal data, but also a multinational company victim of computer intrusion, or even a hospital, or even a bitcoin exchange platform. Analyzing the traffic of a social network like Twitter can then be useful. On Twitter, everyone talks about everything, including cyber risks.
Take the “temperature” of cyber risk
In our study (“Measuring cyber risk” featured in a Banque de France blog post ” A measure of the evolution of cyber risk »), we build a cyber risk indicator based on the number of tweets dealing with this subject in all twitter traffic. This indicator proves to be effective in accounting for the ” temperature “ cyber risk as perceived by users of this network.
Indeed, it shows strong increases in cybersecurity Twitter traffic for all significant cybersecurity events since 2010. Analysis of cybersecurity tweets since the start of the war in Ukraine provides the following insights.
First, the intensification of cyber risk with the war in Ukraine is part of a context of upsurge in cyber attacks. Our cyber risk indicator had remained relatively low after the May 2017 attacks (with WannaCry and NotPetya ransomware) until the revelation in December 2020 of a massive breach of US federal government data.
A rapidly growing activity
Then, it increased sharply in May 2021 with the attack on the Colonial Pipeline oil pipeline system, still in the United States, then from February 2022 with the war in Ukraine. Secondly, the peak in intensity of Twitter traffic on cybersecurity took place at the start of the war (February 24, 2022) and then gradually decreased until it reached pre-war values at the end of March 2022. .
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