Where worlds collide – The intersection between cyber security and climate change

The year is 2014 – climate change hacktivists have deployed ransomware to a law firm that represents companies in the mining, energy and oil and gas sectors. The hacktivists have gone a step further and hijacked a website belonging to a mining company that has just identified a new area to extract cobalt. Their demand: halt all operations intended to extract the mineral and pay a hefty $1B to the local council in the area or risk exposure of highly confidential information held by the law firm that represents them to the public and lose access to their website for as long as the hacktivists see fit. Tick tock – the clock on the website is ticking, and the countdown is on.

It reads like something out of the series “24” (but make it cyber) but really it’s not far-fetched at all. Over 10 years ago, the EU carbon trading website became a target of hacktivists, who hijacked the website to protest carbon trading.

This is just one side of the dice. There are a few other areas that highlight the connections between climate change and cybersecurity. This talk intends to highlight some of these including, but not limited to the following:

• The impact on business continuity caused by extreme weather events e.g. typhoons, cyclones, floods, fires, and the wider impact on communities reliant on technology and internet capability. As an example, a Pacific Island Nation was cut off from the rest of the world due to an extreme weather event that disrupted internet to the Island.
• Cybersecurity capabilities and the larger IT industry practices that potentially increase carbon footprints e.g. data centres, artificial intelligence.
• Adoption of new technology that will potentially introduce new attack vectors for organisations or nation states that embrace them. One example being the targeting of critical infrastructure that uses this new technology – a tactic typically used by nation-state threat actors, thereby increasing geopolitical instability.

Further, the talk will explore the strategies that can be employed to manage the risk of vulnerabilities being exploited due to the expansion of the threat landscape. The session also seeks to invoke food for thought and discussion around how cybersecurity frameworks and standards could evolve to encourage organisations to think about climate change within their environments.