Two thousand cyberattacks per week, that is the estimated number of attacks targeting Portugal, according to a recent Check Point study. As conflicts evolve, battlefields now stretch beyond land, air, and sea into the cyber domain.

In a recent news broadcast on the national TV channel RTP, Miguel Pupo Correia, President of the Executive Committee and researcher at INESC-ID, highlighted how cyberwarfare is becoming an increasingly important front in conflicts and the inherent implications for infrastructures that are highly valuable to society, such as healthcare, financial systems and telecommunications.

During the interview, the researcher pointed out that the complexity of digital systems makes them difficult to defend, and that more often than not, the impact of physical damage is simply easier to see: “It is more visible to see a hole in a building than to see a cyberattack”. Miguel Pupo Correia also warned that “any European country is an easy target” — and that, for now, no organisation is fully ready to respond. He added that it is crucial to address the the security of critical infrastructures and invest in cybersecurity expertise and technological development in Europe.

Watch the full broadcast (in PT) here

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Image: © RTP