The Luxembourg Directorate of Defence announced on 15 November 2023 the launch of a Competence Hub in Research in Cybersecurity and Cyber Defence (CyberHub), in partnership with the University of Luxembourg. The CyberHub is intended to strengthen and increase Luxembourg’s ability to meet national and international challenges – such as increasingly serious and elaborate cyber threats.
Cybersecurity Democracy for the people by the people The arms race between those seeking to uphold the integrity of elections and those seeking to undermine
In 2020, ten doctoral positions on cybersecurity at SnT were allocated to computer science graduates from West African countries in the framework of the LuxWays programme. Launched by SnT, the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs, and three universities in Senegal and Burkina Faso, LuxWays has acted as a train-the-trainer programme for the academic staff of tomorrow. Three years in, some of these doctoral researchers are designing academic curricula in their countries of origin.
There are no more five strikes and out. In 2021, Twitter introduced a five-strike crisis misinformation policy to hinder fake news. This means that users who violate Twitter’s misleading information policy five times will have their account permanently suspended. Since the policy was enacted, this has led to the suspension of more than 11,000 accounts.
How would our lives change if we couldn’t rely on secure online communications? Even though it feels impossible, it is a tangible risk with the advent of quantum computing. As the underlying technology quickly gains commercial pace, the demise of current encryption techniques and the risk of extremely powerful cyberattacks looms closer. So close, in fact, that intelligence agencies have allegedly been intercepting and storing encrypted data to decrypt in the very near future.
In 2019, media artists created a convincing video showing President Nixon giving a speech that was conceived but never actually recorded. The video, entitled “In Event of Moon Disaster”, features an alternate version of reality in which the famous 1969 Moon landing was unsuccessful. Created using a branch of artificial intelligence, deepfakes, it’s a truly believable video – which in itself is the most sinister part of this evolving technology.
When it comes to our medical data, our banking information, identifiable data or the emails and text messages we exchange daily, we rely on encryption as a first line of defence from attackers vying to steal our identity or cash.
We’re living in a world now where most of the items surrounding us are ‘smart’ – they operate autonomously, respond when we talk to them and even predict our behaviour. That includes our cars. The safety of our cars no longer rests solely on you – the driver or keeper of the keys – but now also on the engineers producing the software of the internal computer.
With more than half a billion internet users, and a growing submarine cable network that will continue to boost the continent’s connectivity, Africa is a prime target for cybercrime.