Opinion – Ronaldo Lemos: The challenge of the moment is the issue of cybersecurity

The end of the year is a time for the “best” lists and also for making predictions about what will be important in the coming year.

In the field of technology there is turmoil on the horizon. In fact, you can’t talk about the “technology field” any more. As contemporary life has become permeated and mediated by technical tools, anything that happens in this area affects everything else.

The promise of the moment is regarding the so-called web 3.0. The term indicates an even deeper decentralization of the internet. Enthusiasm for the idea stems from the success of cryptocurrencies. They ended up building a new autonomous infrastructure on top of the internet itself, in the form of several different blockchains.

The premise is: if this blockchain infrastructure can be used to deliver virtual currencies, why can’t it also be used to deliver everything else? Including food delivery and mobility services, digital identities, banking, media and so on.

All without a “center”, based on trust distributed models.

Web 3.0 has huge potential, including generating a new wave of disruption for many industries. However, it also has the capacity to generate huge problems, more complex than those we face today.

This is the disagreement I have with writer Shoshana Zuboff. She emphasizes in her book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” the problems that the centralization of the internet in the hands of big techs brings. However, the blind spot is precisely the problems that an anti-decentralization movement on the Internet can bring.

The world we are in is complex. We will have to face the social implications of both centralization and decentralization simultaneously.

The current challenge is the issue of cybersecurity. The attack on the Ministry of Health and other government networks was a sample of what could happen in the next year.

Digital attacks have become a political tool. As their authorship is virtually impossible to establish, they can easily be used for manipulation, causing campaigns of fear, uncertainty and doubt, and advancing crooked political agendas.

In this field, the fact that the federal government has been, since 2019, reforming the institutional framework of cybersecurity in the country, stands out.

The main change is to concentrate powers in the hands of the Institutional Security Office, the GSI. Since 2019, the agency has become the effective and central coordinator of the entire cybersecurity policy in the country. The events of recent weeks, in which the Ministry of Health’s digital platforms were offline for more than 13 days, combined with attacks on critical infrastructure such as the Federal Police, show that this change has failed.

It’s an elementary principle that you shouldn’t call power to yourself if you don’t know what to do with it. In other words, you don’t hold a saber in your hand without knowing how to handle it.

Unfortunately, the cybersecurity policy in Brazil has failed and its institutional framework needs to be reformed again. Unless it is politically convenient that the vexation of the last few days continues to repeat itself in the coming months. We’ll see. Happy 2022!

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It’s over Make plans for the new year with a certain amount of stability
Already Make plans for the new year with a margin of uncertainty
It’s coming need to wait for the unexpected