In dialogue with Marco Montironi, privacy expert
We asked our consultant Marco Montironi, a data protection expert, to help us understand the issue of cybersecurity, which has become of global relevance and has a very strong impact on both national economy and policy.
What are the greatest challenges that research faces in terms of cybersecurity?
I believe that the major challenge regards the exponential growth of the effects that cybercrime has on our daily lives, in practice the suspension of essential services along with the theft and divulgation of data, especially in the health sector. This is due to the fact that the software necessary for these crimes is widely available to anyone, not just professional hackers, thanks to the availability of generative tools (artificial intelligence, but also the simple automatic generation of programmes) and payment services that anyone can turn to.
The second, which is probably even greater, is to convince citizens that cybersecurity involves everyone, not just specialists with sophisticated and incomprehensible tools. The simple fact of having a smartphone connected to the Internet means that we are all involved. Finally, I cannot overlook the extreme ease with which fake news are created, and the asymmetrical difficulty in identifying them as fake.
Our conversation with Marco Montironi, conducted by Annaleda Mazzucato, will continue in the coming weeks. We are involved in two projects that deal with cybersecurity: Trust aWare with a European project consortium and Ambizione Italia for Cybersecurity with Microsoft.
