Sweden has long had a well developed information technology (IT) infrastructure and both government agencies and business to a large extent uses IT solutions.
Now the FRA, Sweden's signals intelligence agency, in a recent report warns that cyber attacks against Sweden will increase.
What we see is that the attacks will continue to increase, and they become more sophisticated," says Cecilia Laurén, information security expert at FRA and author of the report.
The attacks are becoming more sophisticated and targeted. The attackers have increasingly an explicit goal and agenda, such as intelligence gathering, financial crime and industrial espionage.
Foreign countries in recent years have stepped up their IT investments and now stand for the most sophisticated cyber attacks. The FRA do however not want to name any of the countries that have spied on or attacked Sweden.
But for Sweden, it may mean that public authorities and civic functions are wiped-out, state secrets are lost, and that Swedish companies will have new technology and research stolen by competitors.
Yesterday, the National Fortifications Administration went out with a warning that Swedish companies lose international contracts since their IT systems are leaking heavily. Recipients of the secret information is foreign intelligence services and competitors. This because of sloppy procurement of so-called cloud services.
Also organized crime and terrorists are increasingly carrying out cyber attacks and can exploit vulnerabilities in IT systems.
"Government agencies and businesses need to do a proper data classification and be better at keeping track of what information is really sensitive. Additional training is also needed to deal with the problem. It is also important to keep up with the technical development," says Cecilia Laurén.