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Why I Wrote CyberSecurity Metaverse

Every new digital world arrives selling wonder and quietly shipping new ways to be harmed.

By Sajed Khan/Jul 2, 2024/3 min read

The metaverse conversation got loud long before it got practical. For a while, everyone wanted to talk about virtual worlds, digital assets, avatars, and immersive experiences. That is fine. New frontiers are exciting and they should be. But every new digital environment creates new trust problems before anyone bothers to name them, and that gap is where I wanted to plant a flag. So I wrote CyberSecurity Metaverse.

The pattern repeats every time

I have watched this movie before. A new technology arrives. The first wave is all wonder and possibility. The security questions get waved off as something to figure out later. Then later arrives, usually in the form of fraud, stolen identities, and harm that could have been anticipated, and everyone acts surprised. The early internet went through it. Mobile went through it. Cloud went through it. The metaverse, and whatever we end up calling its successor, is no different.

Identity is the hard problem

In an immersive environment, the oldest security question becomes the newest one. Who are you, really? When your presence is an avatar, your assets are digital, and your interactions feel physical, the stakes of identity go up fast. Impersonation stops being an inconvenience and becomes a way to commit real fraud and real harm against real people. I wanted the book to take that seriously rather than treat it as a footnote to the fun part.

Every immersive experience is also an attack surface. The more real it feels, the more it matters who is actually on the other side.

New environments, familiar human weakness

One thing I tried to make clear is that the threats are not as alien as the technology. The interface is new. The human vulnerabilities are ancient. People still trust too quickly, click too fast, and assume the world they can see is the whole world. Attackers know this and they follow people into whatever environment they move to next. The metaverse did not invent social engineering. It just gave it a more convincing stage.

Why write it before the world was ready

It would have been easier to wait until immersive technology matured and then write the cautionary book with the benefit of hindsight. I did not want to do the easy version. Security is at its best when it shows up early, while design choices are still being made, when a thoughtful question can actually change the architecture. By the time the harms are obvious, the foundations are poured and you are stuck retrofitting safety onto something that was never built for it.

The throughline of everything I write

This book sits alongside my children's book and my articles as part of one idea. New technology is not neutral, and trust does not arrive automatically. Somebody has to think about the risk while everyone else is thinking about the demo. I would rather be early and occasionally wrong than late and predictably right. If you want the broader version of that argument, I made it in the future of technology leadership.