In this ever changing and quickly evolving political landscape that the world operates under, should we be increasingly concerned of cyber-attacks and fraud as more nations remove themselves further and further from communism?
As we hit the teen years of the 21st century, it is becoming increasingly evident that the one and only ideal that nations abide by is that of capitalism and the growth of a nation’s economy. Since the imperial ages the one true definition of a successful empire was the wealth that was cultivated through the years of pillaging the resources of target nations. Fast forward a few hundred years and our sociological and political landscape has seen monumental change, except for this one underlying ideal. Wealth is Power.
Nations who adopted communist ideals prior to and throughout the cold war sought to adopt levels of communalist and socialist standards that would elevate them and carry them through the next few hundred years, but through this, greed and oligarchy quashed any hope that communism would succeed, with globalisation and capitalism reigning supreme. This war between socio-political standpoints saw a few very potent issues arise within communist nations; “all are equal, some are just more equal than others” - Orwell. Through the fall of communism there was a mad power and asset grab that saw a few super rich emerge with the remainder being pushed into abject poverty. Those who are not familiar with Orwell should give Animal farm a quick read to get acquainted with the ideas and commentary surrounding this issue.
Fast Forward to 2015. The nations that were staunch proponents of communism throughout these eras, such as Russia and China are trying to make up for lost time, money is the universal language, but they have 40+ years to make up for. How does one accumulate wealth at an accelerated rate to make up for lost time in the information age? If the stats are anything to go by, cyber-attacks, fraud and hacking are a safe bet. With 45% of the world’s hackers coming out of China and Russia, it seems to be paying off.
These nations are seeing large numbers of unemployed, tech savvy youth that are fed up with living beneath the super-rich and are still disenfranchised by the capitalist movement’s success within their nations that left them well below the line of survival. This is where these youths initially came into play, targeting wealthy host nations with the intent of equalising their situations. Which was well and good for a little while until nations like China and Russia saw advantage here and started to state fund these initiatives causing huge government level attacks worth billions of dollars.
If we were to attribute the hacker percentage to the lost revenue estimate as a result of cybercrime, we can see that the mad rush to compensate for 40+ years of communism through these crimes is working out to be an effective way to do it.
According to McAfee a conservative estimate is $375USD billion in losses per annum. By making an assumption that 45% of the population is responsible for around 45% of the gross losses, hackers from China and Russia alone, are responsible for around $168USD billion of lost revenue per year. In China alone, this attributes to 2% of their total GDP when losses are translated to financial gain, which is of course not always the case, but still incredibly large numbers for a country that holds 20% of the world population.
Cyber-attacks are by no means a communist invention nor a favoured attack method all things considered, they are just another tool to level the playing field within a globalised economy in which the wealth of many communist nations is a few generations behind.
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