The Column – Cyber Security Week
The conversation with my friend Lorenzo started as many good conversations start: from a coincidence. Olympics, space missions, major global events that catalyze collective attention, which means dates circled in red on the world calendar. Punctually, around those dates, the long shadow of a possible cyber attack grows. The question seems obvious: why there? The answer, however, is less so.
We are used to thinking of the attack as an aggressive, noisy, almost theatrical gesture. A digital explosion that interrupts services, humiliates organizers, produces headlines, but in the cyber domain the attack is rarely a cannon shot, rather it is more like a folding knife: small, discreet, above all foldable. And that’s the point. A large event is a huge, exposed, complex surface with thousands of systems, suppliers, interfaces, people. A living organism that cannot afford to stop, but the real advantage for the attacker is not so much the visibility of the target but the structure of the risk. If the attack fails, nothing happens: no proof of failure, no signature; a bit like knocking on a door at night and leaving if no one answers. If it works, the options multiply. And this is where cyber becomes interesting, because unlike many other forms of conflict, it does not force you to decide first what to do with what happens. The decision can be postponed: one can remain silent and observe; you can claim it and capitalize on it or you can stay in the shadows and let the apparent failure of those who were supposed to protect everything do its corrosive work, slowly, like humidity in the walls.
This flexibility is the real power multiplier: not technical impact, but strategic ambiguity. A cyber attack is a letter that you can decide to send, tear up or leave in the drawer after writing it; meanwhile, the mere fact that it exists changes the balance. Those who defend do not know whether the worst is over or is yet to come; he who observes doubts; whoever suffers gets worn out.
Big events, then, are not targets because they are symbolic, but because they are asymmetrical. Forced to function anyway, under everyone’s eyes, with margins of error close to zero. The attacker, on the other hand, plays with huge margins and low costs. It’s a game in which one of the two must always expose himself, the other only if he wants to. In the end, the coincidence of dates matters less than it seems (also the launch of Artemis has been postponed), what matters is the nature of the medium. In cyber space, real power is not to strike, but to be able to decide when and whether to say you have struck. Silence, sometimes, is the most successful attack: anonymous and worrying
