“The biggest threat we face is not ransomware but romance scam— which is super boring and has been there for hundreds of years. It is a scam in which one pretends to be interested in you and then scams you,” said Serge Droz, the Security Lead at Proton Technologies, during the 2021 Cyber Stability conference organised by the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR). The panel discussion, moderated by Giacomo Persi Paoli, Programme Lead, UNIDIR, was convened to discuss existing and potential threats in cyberspace. Anastasiya Kazakova, Senior Manager for Public Affairs, Kaspersky, and Klára Jordan, Chief Public Policy Officer, Cyber Peace Institute were the other panelists. It is important to understand the scope of threats that afflict cyberspace so as to understand the mechanisms one needs to put in place to protect victims and mitigate damage to assets including financial ones. Future-proof norms are a challenge, says Serge Droz Information Bias: “...a lot of discussions today seem very reactive. A recent study, for example, investigated the victim landscape in various reports and the findings were quite shocking because most of the reports of commercial companies cover attacks on other commercial enterprises and leave out civil society, not because they're not interesting but because these are victims are not potential customers,” said Serge Droz in response to a question on gaps in the threat landscape. He highlighted that the private sector had a strong bias. “It is one of the two challenges we face and we must accept the fact…
