Dar es Salaam, Sept. 21 -- TWENTY-five years ago, on September 11, 2001, the world witnessed an event that fundamentally changed the way governments, businesses and ordinary people thought about security.

The terrorist attacks in the United States caused enormous loss of life and disruption. Beyond the immediate tragedy, September 11 exposed an important reality: major disruption can arrive suddenly, affect interconnected systems and force organisations to operate under conditions they had never imagined.

Today, the nature of some of the threats facing society has changed. Increasingly, disruption can begin not with a physical attack, but with a few lines of malicious computer code, stolen passwords, compromised suppliers or an attack o...