At his farewell speech in August outgoing, Telstra CEO Andy Penn mentioned that the cyber threat has never been as serious as the present. He mentioned the deteriorating geopolitical situation and the big shift in how criminals operate in the cyber domain.

One thing is for sure is that in order to enjoy all the positives resulting from the digital economy, we need to be far more vigilant about the barrage of information that we are receiving and/or have access to.

As we are seeing all around us, there are plenty of people, organizations and even governments that are more than eager to (mis)use the digital media for their own self-interest, and that includes misinformation, lies, half-truth, scamming, hacking, phishing and so on they are more than happy to use these tools in advertising, politics, ideologies and conspiracies.

For too long, we have been used to situations where truth was the norm, sure all of the above misbehaviors were there as well, but at a significantly lower scale. Generally, we could trust our politicians, business leaders and the media.

Since social media, this has changed significantly, and we now, as societies, have to learn to be far more critical in our thinking. While social media cause emotional reactions in us, to which we instantly respond and/or indicate that we like it or not, we need to use reason and perhaps pause before we instantly react. Often, we do get an inkling that something might not be true, a gutfeel. If that…