ne of the starkest institutional failures in 2025 is cybersecurity. According to the 2025 World Economic Forum Global Cybersecurity Outlook, “71% of cyber leaders at the Annual Meeting on Cybersecurity 2024 believe that small organizations have already reached a critical tipping point where they can no longer adequately secure themselves against the growing complexity of cyber risks.” Moreover, according to the 2025 IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report, the global average cost of a data breach in 2025 was $4.44 million, whereas by 2031 cybercrime will cost the world $12.2 trillion annually. The matter is merely technical; the very structures that we all entrust to safeguard the digital realm continue being trapped into an outdated understanding of risk, responsibility, and interdependence.
Ransomware waves, supply–chain implosions, deepfake–driven information sabotage and AI–powered autonomous attacks reflect a failure that is systemic, epistemic, and cultural. Institutions keep on treating cyberspace as an auxiliary domain rather than an embedded substrate upon which contemporary economic life, geopolitical power, and social cohesion fundamentally rest.
What has collapsed? The assumption that cybersecurity can be delegated, has resulted in a fragile ecology of interconnected systems in which responsibility is diffused to the point of evaporation. The deeper failure is conceptual. Cybersecurity is socio–technical, with threats being emerging phenomena arising from complexity, hyperconnectivity, and accelerated automation and not simply anomalies erupting from malicious actors.
Cybersecurity is a kinetic determinant of societal stability, with digital infrastructures being inseparable from our everyday lives (e.g. democratic processes, diplomatic operations, food distribution, healthcare systems, energy grids). The digital world has no perimeters, so digital security cannot be framed as a matter of a perimeter defense myth. Vulnerability is not an exception—it is the ambient state of our modern networked world. With infrastructure being increasingly dominated by machine–driven processes that exceed human cognitive thresholds, human oversight quickly becomes obsolete.
Future resilience depends on profound cognitive and architectural orientation. Cybersecurity should serve the purpose of preserving the digital civilization, rather than mitigating risk. Institutions must adopt an ethos of transparency, continuous verification, and shared accountability. They must create organizational environments where information about breaches, vulnerabilities and adversarial innovations is not suppressed for fear of reputational harm or lack of compliance. Trust should not be assumed, rather should be continuously demonstrated and verified.
Cybersecurity demands a new form of cyber–governance, which treats digital interdependence with the same seriousness as nuclear deterrence, global conflicts and climate change. This is a clear acknowledgement on the depth of our collective fate and how entangled it is with invisible computational scaffolding.
Cybersecurity is a design philosophy not a compliance exercise. Technological innovation is inseparable from considerations of resilience. The default state of every AI system should be skepticism rather than trust. Ultimately, cybersecurity should evolve from being a mere reactive discipline towards being a neuralgic stabilizing force, capable of sustaining the fragile, interwoven digital world that we have created.
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Cybersecurity, the first institutional failure of a hyperconnected era
Photo by Chidy Young on Unsplash
January 16, 2026
As cyber risks grow more complex, cybersecurity can no longer be delegated—it must be addressed by institutions. Making this shift requires we recognize cybersecurity is not risk migration, its true purpose is preserving the digital civilization, writes Dr. Dimitrios Salampasis.
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ne of the starkest institutional failures in 2025 is cybersecurity. According to the 2025 World Economic Forum Global Cybersecurity Outlook, “71% of cyber leaders at the Annual Meeting on Cybersecurity 2024 believe that small organizations have already reached a critical tipping point where they can no longer adequately secure themselves against the growing complexity of cyber risks.” Moreover, according to the 2025 IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report, the global average cost of a data breach in 2025 was $4.44 million, whereas by 2031 cybercrime will cost the world $12.2 trillion annually. The matter is merely technical; the very structures that we all entrust to safeguard the digital realm continue being trapped into an outdated understanding of risk, responsibility, and interdependence.
Ransomware waves, supply–chain implosions, deepfake–driven information sabotage and AI–powered autonomous attacks reflect a failure that is systemic, epistemic, and cultural. Institutions keep on treating cyberspace as an auxiliary domain rather than an embedded substrate upon which contemporary economic life, geopolitical power, and social cohesion fundamentally rest.
What has collapsed? The assumption that cybersecurity can be delegated, has resulted in a fragile ecology of interconnected systems in which responsibility is diffused to the point of evaporation. The deeper failure is conceptual. Cybersecurity is socio–technical, with threats being emerging phenomena arising from complexity, hyperconnectivity, and accelerated automation and not simply anomalies erupting from malicious actors.
Cybersecurity is a kinetic determinant of societal stability, with digital infrastructures being inseparable from our everyday lives (e.g. democratic processes, diplomatic operations, food distribution, healthcare systems, energy grids). The digital world has no perimeters, so digital security cannot be framed as a matter of a perimeter defense myth. Vulnerability is not an exception—it is the ambient state of our modern networked world. With infrastructure being increasingly dominated by machine–driven processes that exceed human cognitive thresholds, human oversight quickly becomes obsolete.
Future resilience depends on profound cognitive and architectural orientation. Cybersecurity should serve the purpose of preserving the digital civilization, rather than mitigating risk. Institutions must adopt an ethos of transparency, continuous verification, and shared accountability. They must create organizational environments where information about breaches, vulnerabilities and adversarial innovations is not suppressed for fear of reputational harm or lack of compliance. Trust should not be assumed, rather should be continuously demonstrated and verified.
Cybersecurity demands a new form of cyber–governance, which treats digital interdependence with the same seriousness as nuclear deterrence, global conflicts and climate change. This is a clear acknowledgement on the depth of our collective fate and how entangled it is with invisible computational scaffolding.
Cybersecurity is a design philosophy not a compliance exercise. Technological innovation is inseparable from considerations of resilience. The default state of every AI system should be skepticism rather than trust. Ultimately, cybersecurity should evolve from being a mere reactive discipline towards being a neuralgic stabilizing force, capable of sustaining the fragile, interwoven digital world that we have created.
