Systemic Cybersecurity Risk and the Role of the Global Community: Managing the Unmanageable

In both cases, the rolling flow of disruption was neither predicted nor predictable. These incidents show how the technologies that support businesses, infrastructure, and societies are increasingly interdependent and vulnerable. Different technologies across a multitude of organizations now have the same common dependencies or weaknesses. This means the impact of cybersecurity incidents can cascade from organization to organization and across borders. The risks this creates are systemic, contagious, and often beyond the understanding or control of any single entity. Systemic risks can be difficult to predict and quantify and even more difficult to manage.

Traditional cybersecurity approaches are limited in their ability to understand and deal with systemic risks due to their necessary focus on single entities, systems, and supply chains. As cybersecurity threats multiply, escalate, and coalesce, it is imperative for the global community to treat cybersecurity risk as a systemic challenge that requires collective decision-making and coordinated action across governments, the private sector, and civil society. This briefing paper outlines how the technology and cybersecurity landscape is changing, why these changes make cybersecurity risk management a systemic issue, and how governments, international organizations, the private sector, and civil society must collaborate to make society resilient to systemic cyber events.