Geneva, 26th January 2011: At the 5th Global Competitiveness Forum in Riyadh, Carlos Moreira, founder and CEO of WISeKey, a leading eSecurity company, speaking alongside Jean Chretien, former Canadian Prime Minister, Caroline Daniels, chairman and CEO of Aircraft Technical Publishers, James Turley, chairman and CEO of Ernst & Young and Muhammad Al-Jasser, Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency Governor, underlined the importance of providing digital security for web users around the world.
In line with the words of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, one of the main challenges of the future is the question of security in the modern world. How data is secured and the identity of each individual interacting online is protected is at the top of WISeKey’s list of priorities. Mr. Moreira underlined that the web is a 20-year-old infrastructure that was not designed to carry the load or face the security issues or usage of the system today. “In the coming years it is imperative that we promote a new system that provides security for users around the world.”
With so much personal information on the web, protecting this information is the biggest challenge. Any basic hacker can buy software for $300 and get into the infrastructures. Wikileaks has grabbed everyone’s attention recently, but there is also the fact that government systems providing for example ID cards and also financial services are built on outdated infrastructures that do not do the upmost to protect the individual. And, Mr. Moreira added, “we are not only adding more people to the web — Facebook is a great example of that — we are also adding new devices. [In the next 10 years] there will be 50 billion devices that will be interconnecting through the web.”
With over 7 billion people soon having mobile phones and being added “to the current infrastructure, the complexity of the problem we are facing now will be increased.” The solution is simple, he said. “We should treat the web the same way as we treat a product. We have international organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) that handle dispute resolution of products and services. We don't have an international organization that is an equivalent of the WTO and does the same thing with data — the most important, ubiquitous product of the 21st century.”
WISeKey works to secure the individual by creating secure digital identities and by providing platforms that are truly citizen-centric, so that people can securely carry out their governmental or other business online, without any risk of ID or data theft. As the web moves from a web of servers to a web of people and things, trust needs to be created. It is inherent at this stage that companies and governments consider data and digital security as a high priority. In order to allow a useful, functional web to emerge, data privacy is of utmost importance.
Contact:
Olivia Ward
oward@wisekey.com
+41(0)22-594-30-00