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Philippe Stoll, the Red Cross’s ‘techplomat’, is Inside Geneva’s Summer Profile this week.
“I studied economics and I think I could have been a banker or something like that. A good Swiss indeed! But my mother was a volunteer at the Red Cross, and I think she influenced me a lot about maybe being human or taking care of humans,” he says.
He’s helping the International Committee of the Red Cross
(ICRC) develop a new digital emblem to warn cyber warriors against attacking protected structures like hospital software, or confidential data.
“Cyber attacks are increasingly carried out by machines. It’s a machine talking to another machine, and this certificate is a way to identify something that the machine will understand and not attack.”
Such attacks are already happening.
“The ICRC suffered from a cyber attack in 2022. It’s not a question of if, it’s more question of when. We know that the ICRC has access to information that is highly interesting for state or non state armed groups,” says Stoll.
And they can cause enormous harm,
“[such as] the distress of people not being able to get the information online because it was hacked or the fact that some information might put your family or you at risk because you belong to a tribe or clan that is under attack.”
Join host Imogen Foulkes for an in-depth discussion – how do we uphold the Geneva Conventions in 21st-century wars?
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Host: Imogen Foulkes
Production assitant: Claire-Marie Germain
Distribution: Sara Pasino
Marketing: Xin Zhang