Can you imagine what our society will look like at the end of the decade? How will we shop, socialise and consume services?

How as businesses will we authenticate customers, manage our services and protect critical data from a growing array of increasingly sophisticated and determined adversaries?

Of course, we don’t have all the answers at Trend Micro but we’ve taken a big step in the right direction with our 2020 web-series.

With 2020 we’re trying to get everyone from policy-makers and IT bosses to school kids, to start thinking about the future, how technology will influence our lives at the end of this decade and the implications for data security and privacy.

So often in the information security industry we restrict ourselves by operating to 12 month prediction cycles, but as we all know, advances in technology and online threats move at a much faster rate.

IT professionals in particular need to think further into the future to better fortify their systems against attack and avoid wasted investments in outdated technology.

We hope this nine video series will help get the ball rolling.

Based on an ICSPA report “Project 2020 Scenarios for the future of cybercrime”, the web series is set in the fictitious European country of South Sylvania.

A technologically advanced nation where every citizen maintains multiple online profiles, with a secure centralized hub known as The Switch managing authentication as they move between each.

The majority of citizens in this future world wear contact lenses or glasses through which they consume personalized digital content, including advertising and marketing, all served up by a burgeoning Content Service Provider industry.

Episode one, launched today, introduces us to South Sylvania on the eve of its first all-digital election. We meet Kinuko, a twenty-something software engineer and digital native; Prime Minister Carrington, Yanek, a career cyber criminal; and Adam, a hacktivist.

Without warning, a massive cyber attack hits South Sylvania’s critical national infrastructure, at the same time, a malfunction in The Switch, throws the country into chaos…

Trend Micro invested a great deal of time, effort and thought into creating this online video series. The future of our society is intrinsically linked to advances in technology and the ways people find to subvert it, so we hope 2020 will get as many folk as possible thinking about what may happen as we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st Century.

Check out Episode 1 below:

To view the series visit http://2020.trendmicro.com

By Rik Ferguson (VP Security Research) - Trend Micro