The nature of open-sourcing for IP and the IoT is the main contributor for theft.

It is not surprising then that hackers and proponents of digital-age corporations such as Napster, Facebook and Google find the stealing of IP and denying the genuine creators of content royalties a natural course of events in the same way as those who support open access. These tendencies are related to other web-based social malaise such as not respecting the private nature of data collection or the interference in the outcomes of elections. This has led to the founder of the world wide web Sir Tim Berners-Lee to battle ‘digital dystopia’ and call for greater regulation and certain standards to be instituted. In November 2019 he proposed through his World Wide Web Foundation a Contract for the Web that would stop election interference by foreign powers, hate speech, abuse of privacy and disinformation.4

As my Managing Cyber Risk in the Financial Sector book noted, when planning to mitigate cyber risk the centre of the enquiry should not be prevention based on statistical modelling or solely on IT packages but on the human-based variables. Hackers cannot steal IP or alter GPS systems connected to ship navigation without human ignorance/error, collusion, grudges, greed, malice and geo-political imperatives. Therefore, it is important to understand not only how the technology works, such as the multi-connections of Internet of Things (IoT) devices that allow through interconnectivity so many more ways for hackers to exploit the weaknesses in so many connections to enter the cyber system, but also it is essential to understand the human motivation for the hacking. It is also crucial to look internally in an organisation to find those with a motivation to carry out cyberattacks to undermine the system without being caught. In an increasingly complex world and particularly with cyberwarfare, we must assess the motivations of the very human global players behind the cyberattacks. Likewise, in a company it is essential to train staff and customers as well as managers in SME supply chains. Those that supply goods to the larger companies are the weakest links because of their lack of human resources. Larger companies are usually the best prepared to counter cyberattack because of an abundance of resources, both human and technological due to economy of scale.