Cyberattacks decaying Western economies, expert warns
The global cyber environment has become a “society wide crisis”, where a recent slew of attacks are threatening the foundation of Western economies, an expert has warned.
A year-long avalanche of detrimental attacks on British retailers; Co-op, M&S, and more recently, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR); has pointed to a far deeper concern, Charl van der Walt, head of security research at Orange Cyberdefense, told City PM.
Cybercrime, he argued, has become industrialised. Attackers are only multiplying. And trust, in both the private and public sectors, has become the primary target.
A shifting cyber space
The biggest emerging threat is the so-called “balkanisation”, or state fragmentation, of the cyberspace.
Van der Walt explained that tech stacks, ranging from threat intelligence to vulnerability disclosure, are fragmenting along geopolitical fault line.
This, he added, is leaving Europe acutely vulnerable.
“Almost everything that we do in security, in some way, goes back to the US”, van der Walt stated.
“While at the moment, only the US and China possess the capacity to build full sovereign tech stacks, Europe and smaller nations are increasingly exposed to “dependency to this supply chain.”
This, he warned, means the continent is fundamentally reliant on a system outside its control. His concern is not a sudden explosion, but rather a slow, deliberate erosion of autonomy.
“The worst case isn’t an explosion. The worst case is like a slow withering,” he told City PM.
This splintering also cripples the efforts of law enforcement.
While the report records a clear and steady annual increase in global law enforcement activity since 2021, with 40 per cent of cases involving private actor contribution, van der Walt is sceptical about future cross-border cooperation in this “multi-polar reality.”
A cyber extortion harvest
The sheer volume of attacks we’ve recently witnessed reflects this political “barrage”, as van der Walt described it.
Orange Cyberdefense’s recent analysis confirmed that cyber extortion is exploding, with the number of victims tripling since 2020.
What’s more, 44.5 per cent surge was found in the last 11 months alone.
This surge hasn’t been driven by a handful of serial criminals, rather the number of distinct cybercrime groups has nearly tripled from 33 to 89 since 2020.
That is due to the “commoditisation of cybercrime as a service”, which has drastically lowered the entry cost for attackers, allowing them to “multiply and thrive”.
Crucially, attackers are targeting the weakest links, with SMEs accounting for two-thirds of cyber victims, a trend van der Walt calls a “harvest, not big game hunting”.
He told City PM that the old, linear perception of the supply chain is dead: “In reality, we exist within a dense web of interdependence where a single weakness can enable mass compromise.”
Small businesses in manufacturing, professional services, and healthcare are becoming prime conduits to amplify economic and social consequences.
A new, cognitive battlefield
The threat is amplified by the industrialisation of crime and, of course, the adoption of AI.
Chief tech officer Vivien Mura noted that attackers “use AI to speed up the coding development of malwares,” shrinking the window between vulnerability disclosure and exploitation.
But, van der Walt added that the most chilling threat is the shift of focus toward cognitive warfare.
Hacktivism is evolving into a complex ecosystem aligned with state interests, moving beyond mere disruption to targeted disinformation and influence.
The ultimate objective, according to van der Walt, is not data theft or system shutdown, but the “decaying the fabric of society” and the “undermining of trust.”
He referenced the US 2016 election, arguing that the true impact wasn’t the technical hack, but how adversaries used the compromised information “to very cynically, change conversations, change mindsets, set people against one another.”
He concluded that governments must change the narrative, treating these incidents not as individual business problems, but as a collective “political assault.”
He suggested security leaders should stop using the term “cybersecurity” altogether, as the issue is so deeply integrated into every aspect of life: “We should just talk about security.”