The Great Cybersecurity Divide
Brendan Dowling, Steven Matainaho, Tupou Baravilala, Kuan Seah Chua
RSA Conference 2025 · Day 1 · Policy
The global digital divide is shrinking — billions of people across the Asia-Pacific are gaining internet access via subsea cables and satellite networks — but the cybersecurity divide is not. As connectivity reaches some of the world's most remote communities, scams, ransomware, and nation-state interference are arriving at the same time, often targeting populations with no experience defending against digital threats. At RSA 2025, voices rarely heard at the world's largest cybersecurity conference delivered a direct message to the industry: the products and services you build are not designed for our context, our budgets, or our languages — and people are being harmed as a result. ---
AI review
This panel deserves more attendance than it got at 8:30 a.m. on the conference's last day. Voices from Fiji, PNG, and Singapore deliver a specific, operational critique of the security industry's market assumptions that no amount of Western policy discussion replicates. PNG's 40-to-80% connectivity growth in five years paired with a 67% YoY threat surge is the most vivid data point on the table, and the Singapore scam loss figure — SGD 1.1B in a country of five million — makes the problem concrete in ways that PowerPoint decks about 'the global threat landscape' never do.