The third largest economy in the world

Chadi Habib, CTO and Head of Business Solutions at WSP, opens with the widely quoted estimate that cybercrime costs the world roughly ten trillion dollars a year, on pace by some reports to overtake China's GDP by 2025, close to the world's third largest economy his title references. He warns against chasing goldfish cracker distractions: acronyms, frameworks and vendor trends that feel urgent but do not map to real risk. Organizations should instead define their actual crown jewels, client data, employee data, and confidential business flows, before spreading effort across every certification. He illustrates how fast social engineering evolves with an unnamed case where attackers used a live deepfake video call impersonating a CFO to convince an employee in Asia to wire twenty-five million dollars across eleven accounts, with no malware or perimeter breach involved. Using a Boeing Starliner anecdote about astronauts stranded in orbit, he stays optimistic as physical and virtual systems merge, but urges clients to build real technical fluency rather than just buy AI tools, since attackers keep improving and defenders must match that pace continuously.