Guest Editorial: Cyber-Attacks, Strategic Cyber-Foresight, and Security

The papers in this special section focus on cyberattacks, strategic cyber-foresight, and security applications. Reports of cyber-attacks against individuals, organizations, and businesses are on the rise. Attackers usually have a deliberate and malicious intent and may involve the criminals taking advantage of flaws in software code, using tricks to get around antivirus tools, and or exploiting unsuspecting users into divulging sensitive information. Often launched by isolated amateurs, or criminals that belong to often well-structured organizations, with money, motivation, and an agenda, such attacks are frequently designed to temporarily or indefinitely disrupt services of a host connected to the internet or simply grind institutional systems to a halt. Popular among social engineering, malwares employed in such attacks are what has come to be known as a distributed denial-of-service attack, which affect the infrastructure of websites, computer servers, and other network resources resulting in the compromise of critical personal or institutional data. Across the globe, these attacks are growing in sophistication, and they tend to have serious economic and security consequences for their targets. The chaos they precipitate can be life-threatening, and their cost can be considerable to target organizations or nations. Such features also affect the dynamics of collaboration among firms, thus posing negative effects on innovation dynamics.