Sci-Fi Web Videos Warn of Cyber Threats of the Future

The camera pans across a futuristic cityscape, where men and women wearing Google Glass-like headgear walk the streets, and ominous orchestral music plays in the background. It’s not the beginning of the latest big-budget Hollywood sci-fi flick, but a series of web videos created by security software company Trend Micro Inc. to show what cybercrime of the future might look like.

The series, called 2020, consists of nine episodes clocking in at about four minutes each, and tells the story of South Sylvania–a fictional Central European country where by the year 2020 technology has crept into nearly every aspect of daily life, allowing data to become more vulnerable than ever before. The idea for the series began with a white paper from the International Cyber Security Protection Alliance (ICSPA) that outlines scenarios for the future of cybercrime.

“We endeavored to create a gripping series that will drive interest in the white paper and expand the cybersecurity conversation beyond its usual confines,” Rik Ferguson, Trend Micro’s global vice president of security research, told CorpCounsel.com. “We want to get more people involved and more people thinking about the potential risks of new technologies before they become apparent.”

The series, produced in partnership with ICSPA and European Union law enforcement agency Europol, took about six months to plan, Ferguson said, from analyzing the white paper to storyboarding to casting and choosing locations. The shoot, done in Warsaw, Poland, took about a week. Postproduction, including CGI and editing, is ongoing as each new episode is released to the web.

The story of South Sylvania is one of total online connectivity. South Sylvanians use online profiles prolifically and experience the world through a Content Service Provider that tailors the individual’s experience based on their mood and consumer preferences. So after a massive cyberattack threatens the country’s central data hub, the whole country, including its financial systems, grinds to a halt and chaos ensues.

Although the U.S. in 2013 might not be South Sylvania in 2020, Ferguson explained that there is growing potential for cyberattacks in the near future to have much broader impact, like the attack shown in the film. “Increasingly systems are being connected, interconnected, and moved to the cloud,” he said. “The more interconnected every aspect of our lives become, the higher the chances of a domino effect, whether that be personal or in terms of infrastructure.”

What can corporate counsel learn from watching 2020? If viewers could get inside the heads of South Sylvania’s in-house attorneys, they would probably discover that the cybersecurity problems that keep these fictitious lawyers awake at night might not be so different from those that their real-world counterparts worry about today.

“Some of the most common consumer-facing issues dealt with by corporate attorneys in South Sylvania will relate to the process of individuals reclaiming ownership over the ever-increasing amount of data that is being collected about them and processed by third parties,” noted Ferguson.