The fast-paced development of digital and emerging as well as disruptive technologies and their impact on our society is increasingly outpacing our capacity to shape and manage both technology development as well as its proper use responsibly. To this end, digitalization and new technologies must be leveraged as an essential contribution for addressing substantial global challenges including climate change, circular economy, global connectivity and smart production (industry 4.0), secure and safe living together in cities (smart cities), health care, and many more.

Digitalization requires a holistic security approach. Alongside innovation, we must systematically evaluate the structural vulnerabilities of our digital systems. Global disruptive events have impressively demonstrated the critical dependency of modern societies on digital infrastructure. As leaders in digitalization, we bear the responsibility to anticipate and proactively address emerging challenges. Otherwise, we risk unleashing technical systems that could adversely impact large areas of life and simultaneously create new attack surfaces for malicious state and non-state actors.

It is essential to establish research and multistakeholder policy initiatives to build awareness and understanding of the new challenges, including the threats associated with rapid digitalization and new technology integration. It is only through this whole of society understanding that suitable countermeasures can be developed and deployed.

A crucial element of digitalization initiatives is to foster effective dialogue and cooperation between all stakeholders, such as scientists, research, industry, government, technical communities and civil society which are setting guardrails to human-rights-based and sustainable development-oriented development and use of new technologies. In geopolitically volatile times, we must find mechanisms to increase the resilience of our society based on our digital backbone.

The International Digital Security Forum (IDSF) seeks to bring together international and national leadership and stakeholders for information exchange and collaboration. The goal is to build collective knowledge of lessons learned and to build partnership for major event response and mitigation. #IDSF takes place at the MuseumsQuartier in Vienna on a regular basis and participation is exclusively on-site.

Contact
Michael W. Mürling, MA
Conference Director
International Digital Security Forum (IDSF)
Center for Digital Safety & Security
AIT Austrian Institute of Technology
michael.muerling@ait.ac.at