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The cyber security industry emerged rapidly in recent years due to mounting cyber threats and increasing cyber hacking activities. Research on emerging technologies emphasizes the risks and sometimes neglects to address the potential positive contribution to cyber security. The purpose of this study is to conduct a relatively balanced long-term foresight study to elicit major significant threat drivers and to identify emerging technologies that are likely to have a significant impact on defense and attack capabilities in cyber security.

The main instruments used in this study were horizon scanning and an online survey among subject-matter experts that assessed emerging threats and the potential impact of several emerging technologies on cyber defense capabilities and cyber attack capabilities.

An expert survey shows that cyber resilience, homomorphic encryption and blockchain may be considered as technologies contributing mainly to defense capabilities. On the other hand, Internet of Things, biohacking and human machine interface (HMI) and autonomous technologies add mainly to attack capabilities. In the middle, we find autonomous technologies, quantum computing and artificial intelligence that contribute to defense, as well as to attack capabilities, with roughly similar impact on both.

This study adds to the current research a balanced long-term view and experts’ assessment of negative and positive impacts of emerging technologies, including their time to maturity and consensus levels. Two new Likert scale measures were applied to measure the potential impact of emerging technologies on cyber security, thus enabling the classification of the results into four groups (net positive, net negative, positive-positive and negative-negative).

Many emerging technologies are being developed in an accelerating pace and are key drivers of future change. In foresight studies, usually their positive impact on the quality of life is considered or their negative environmental effects. This paper seeks to draw attention to an overlooked “dark side” of new technologies: their potential abuse by terrorists or organized crime. Recent cybercrime events are examples of abuse that perhaps could have been minimized if appropriate foresight studies were performed years ago. This was the aim of the recently completed EU-funded project FESTOS.

Several foresight methodologies were employed. Following a horizon scanning for potentially threatening technologies, a Delphi-type expert survey helped to evaluate critical threat characteristics of selected 33 technologies: the likelihood that each technology will actually come to pose a security threat (in different time frames), the easiness of its malicious use, the severity of the threat, and the most threatened societal spheres.

The results enabled ranking the technologies by their “abuse potential” and “threat intensity”. Certain emerging technologies (or their combinations), regarded as “weak signals”, inspired ideas for potential “wild cards”. In a subsequent workshop, which employed a variant of the “futures wheel” method, four wild-card “scenario sketches” were constructed. These were later developed to full narrative scenarios.

The entire process enables the introduction of security foresight into policy planning in a long-range perspective. The foresight results were followed by the evaluation of policy implications and coping with the knowledge control dilemma. The paper illustrates how a mix of foresight methods can help in a continuous analysis of new and threats posed by emerging technologies, thus raising awareness of decision makers and mitigating the risk of unforeseen surprises.