POLITICAL LEADERS in every country need to take urgent action to combat the imminent threat of cyber-war and cyber-terrorism, a leading international internet security expert has warned.

Eugene Kaspersky believes countries like Ireland and the UK are as vulnerable to a cyber strike as any superpower. Mr Kaspersky, the founder of Kaspersky Lab, the specialist IT security company, said everyone lives in an age where everything is managed by IT systems and if these systems were to crumble the result would be chaos.

“The worst-case scenario is if there was a cyber attack designed to strike our technology-permeated world, one that would attack critical infrastructure, factories, transportation networks.

“Everything is managed by computers today – it makes us as individuals and countries very vulnerable and I believe in the future we will see more of these attacks around the world,” Mr Kaspersky said.

Speaking at the World Cyber Security Technology Research Summit in Belfast last week, the internet security veteran warned that “we all live in a new digital world, a very dangerous world”.

Mr Kaspersky said in his opinion there are five major cyber threats that needed to be addressed globally.

During the summit organised by the Centre for Secure Information Technologies, part of Queen’s University, he shared details of these threats with other experts in the field of cyber security and senior members of the US Department of Homeland Security, the UK’s Home Office and the European Commission.

The first and most pressing is the threat of cyber wars. He said “cyber weapons” could be relatively simple to develop but in the wrong hands could deliver “your worst-case scenario”.

Mr Kaspersky said the prospect that someone could create a virus that could infect one million computers in the UK and effectively bring the country to a standstill was not rooted in a Holywood movie plot but in reality.

He also believes the way social media is being used by some organisations and government could create a host of new cyber threats.

“Social media can be used to inform but it can also be used by others to influence certain events – an uprising, unrest, protests and one of the major problems I see with this is that it is impossible to know who is behind the event – is it a government or it is a genuine movement?

“In my opinion this is a very serious problem because while social media is a very good tool and I am a big believer in it, I also feel worried that we do not know who is controlling it – who is behind it,” Mr Kaspersky added.

He believes two of the more urgent issues to be addressed when it comes to cyber threats on a global scale are the questions surrounding online identification and privacy.

“The less data you share online – the better you should sleep,” said Mr Kaspersky.

Although he first raised the issue of cyber crime with Interpol more than a decade ago, it is as big a problem today as it was 10 years ago.

“We now have what I would describe as the traditional cyber criminals who just randomly target computers – fishing for a victim – and the enterprise cyber criminals, who are more professional and target businesses and organisations.

“If the enterprise criminals have enough resource and budget they will crack you – and that is a growing problem,” Mr Kaspersky said.

He believes the two-day summit in Belfast will help focus international attention on the issue of cyber security.

“We need governments to sign up to an international agreement against cyber weapons – we need to realise the threat.”