With the April 16 referendum, we have started a process that will reinforce Turkey's national sovereignty, its national will. After the referendum, while eastern and southeastern Asian countries such as China, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and Indonesia have intensified their search for opportunities for cooperation in economics and trade, it is very sad that Western countries, who have a great conscientious responsibility toward Turkey that has paid substantial prices for the Western Alliance during the Cold War era, are escalating an implicit economic embargo day by day.
The main core of this hidden embargo, or almost grudge, stems from Turkey's ability to take initiative to get the place it deserves on equal terms on the negotiation table for the restructuring the global economic-political system, under the leadership and vision of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
This is why, even though it hurts our pride and offends us, it is necessary to see the existence of a planned operation aiming to take President Erdoğan out of the field in this highly complex and multi-layered global game, and to utilize all kinds of political, economic and military measures throughout the whole field to eliminate the highly brutal operation of the "asymmetric order." The elections on June 24 will be a step in strengthening the political initiative with the Presidential Government System. We have already proven our military initiative capabilities on a global scale with Operation Euphrates Shield and Operation Olive Branch in northern Syria. This is why, in order to hurt and harm our political capability, our ability to make quick and effective decisions against global affairs, and the critically important milestone in history - June 24 - a secret embargo and operation run by the Western wing on our economy is being constantly escalated.
The U.S.-based credit rating agency Standard and Poor's (S&P) claims that the relations between Turkey and the U.S. have deteriorated, that S-400 air defense missiles bought from Russia may cause potential sanctions and that fines may be imposed on Turkish financial corporations and public entities trading with Iran in its latest report are clear evidence of this attack. Despite this, there is no deterioration in Turkey's main macro indicators and no risk signal in the banking sector, why has S&P suddenly moved its statement, which was supposed to be released in August, to an earlier date? While the Western Alliance is passing a historic test on embracing or losing Turkey, calls for new cooperation rise in China, Japan, and South Korea. President Erdoğan's visit to Uzbekistan and South Korea are the clearest proof of this.
Are we ready for a cybertheft of $6T?
While the strong actors of the global system continue to wrestle each other, an area that receives exponential interest from the international criminal organizations due to its "profitability" is rising: "cybercrime." According to a report by Cybersecurity Ventures website, it is expected that cybercrime, which has damaged the world economy by $3 trillion in 2015 and $3.5 trillion in 2017, will reach $6 trillion in 2021. So, how much did countries of the world spend on education, software, and equipment against cybercrime in 2017? The answer is $1 trillion, another report on cybercrime by the website says.
There is a cruel, dangerous, and inhumane reason for international criminal organizations to show high interest in this field; it earns more money than drug trafficking. This is why the two major threats of the upcoming period are cyberpiracy and cyberransom operations.
Why are criminal activities increasing in this area? Because the number of web sites in the world has reached 12 billion since the World Wide Web was founded in 1989 and the first website was born in 1991. Some 3.8 billion people are using the internet. Today, 51 percent of the world population is connected to the internet, and this ratio will rise to 75 percent in 2022, or 6 billion users; and, in 2030, 90 percent of the population, 7.5 billion people, will be "online." From 2016 to 2020, the cyber data will be increased by 50 fold. It is expected that the number of all smart devices that will benefit from the Internet of Things (IoT) will reach 200 billion by 2020. The number of wearable products that are connected to the internet, which was 310 million in 2017, will reach 500 million in 2021. In 2020, 300 billion passwords will be used in the global internet system; 111 billion lines of code will be annually produced; digital content, which is 4 billion zettabytes in 2017, will reach 96 billion zettabytes in 2020.
Today, in a world economy where one company experiences a cyberransom attack every 40 seconds, this time frame will fall down to 14 seconds in 2019, Cybersecurity Ventures' ransomware report says. Cyber ransom attacks in the world have reached $5 billion by rising 15 fold compared to 2015. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has announced that only in 2017 $1 billion worth of ransom was taken from the U.S. companies. The world needs to increase the number of cybersecurity experts against these attacks from 1 million to 3.5 million. Some 90 percent of the cyberattacks and cybercrimes that leaked from a link in an email have caused a $108 billion damage in U.S. companies, $60 billion in China, 59 in Germany, 7.7 in Brazil, 4.3 in the U.K., 2 in Russia, 1 in Japan, and $450 billion in companies all around the world in 2017. A simple cyberattack, cyberpirate software can cause 150 take-offs worth of damages on state's war planes. Are we ready for $6 trillion damage and are we aware of it?