Cyber risks hit Russian risk agenda–Russia

“Consider that many years ago we didn’t use emails, mobile phones—all these devices. Now we are connected via these devices. This has dramatically changed our behaviour. I am not referring to my company specifically, but rather about the global IT infrastructure. Take denial of service attacks as an example. These activities require a massive amount of data, they are sent to servers, the activities of the servers are blocked. And if servers are blocked, businesses can be paralysed. So if you talk about this globally, it could be a war on the World Wide Web,” he explained.

Mr Mikhaylov said his company has ‘very sophisticated’ equipment and ‘highly technical’ professionals and therefore invests a great deal to be secure. “Of course, it is a trade-off between security and the costs which must be incurred,” he said, as it is with all risk categories.

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Victor Vereshchagin, President of RusRisk, suggested, however, that not so many Russian companies have truly woken up to this fast-emerging risk yet.

“Only a few companies are prepared adequately, mainly those which are exporting, because they have to be more transparent. They have experience with western business partners,” he said.