Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Cyber Defence

Introduction

Cyberspace, from the laying of its first building blocks in the 1950s (the first computers, the first software), to what it has become today – a vast, extremely dense network made up of billions of computers, electronic chips, data flows, with billions of users increasingly dependent on this technological environment – has continued to grow and expand, in a movement of expansion that nothing seems to be able to stop. It has transformed the world, to the point where it has reached the status of a new dimension, alongside the land, the sea, the air and space. Although there was no mention of “cyberspace” in the mid-20th Century, the foundations had already been laid.

Since then, this expansion has been motivated as much by scientific as by economic and industrial motives, as well as by political issues.

The recent technological markers of this development are, for example, “Big Data”, “cloud computing”, “4G”, “5G”, the “Internet of Things”, “IPv6” and “social media”. At the political and societal level, the manifestations of this expansion can be seen by access to the Internet, which affects an ever-growing population, by increasingly “digital” societies (e-administrations, social media, etc.) and by economies that are increasingly dependent on networks, the Internet, computers and communication tools. Some see the effects of this expansion of cyberspace as the democratization of societies, greater freedom of expression and a more dynamic and efficient economy, while ...