Navigating the Threat Landscape: Interview with Wortell Dennis

Cybersecurity is an important topic. Everyone agrees on that. In recent years, many organizations have learned through trial and error. Cyberattacks are the order of the day and hackers never sleep. In this context, it is crucial to take the right measures and to remain alert. At the same time, you want to avoid panic football. Sometimes that is quite difficult, because 'cybersecurity' now also seems to have become a buzzword .

"Some now see cybersecurity as a framework on which you hang topics that you can't put anywhere else," says Dennis de Hoog, Business Manager Security at Wortell. "This makes it more difficult for organizations to separate information from disinformation."

How do you separate the wheat from the chaff? That is what Dennis tells in this two-part blog series!

Connecting everything to the 'cyber playing field'

Is there a major power outage? Are there problems on the railway? Can't we withdraw money in the supermarket for a while? Then the label 'cyber attack' is immediately stuck on it, even before there are any indications of this. "Of course, in such a case, it could be a cyber threat," says Dennis. "But the media often do not highlight or highlight too late that the culprit could just as well be a broken cable or a mistake caused by human action. You see this in many current events these days: everything is directly connected to the 'cyber playing field'. There are quite a few experts who add nuances and share useful insights. But sometimes it seems as if the media prefers to focus on cyber threats, even when there is no or insufficient reason to do so."

Resentful, Dennis thinks. Because this makes an already complex subject unmanageable for many organizations. "In my view, we have to stick to the facts," he says. "If you put everything under the cyber domain, it is more difficult for organizations to determine where the real threats lie."

Same threats, more scale and speed

If we leave all the media and hypes aside for a moment, what will the threat landscape really look like in 2025? Dennis: "We can bring in all kinds of peripheral issues and use difficult words, but actually the threats of today are the same as those of about 25 years ago. Digitization and the further development of technology have only made it 'easier' for malicious parties to carry out attacks. The scale and speed have been drastically increased. But in essence, it is still about the same things."

Just like in the past, an organization still has so-called crown jewels. "Nowadays, that is often a treasure trove of data that you keep in a digital safe," Dennis explains. "In 2025, you will secure this safe in a completely different way than in the past."

The reason for this today is twofold: "The risk of being hacked is only one threat. In addition, organizations can face serious consequences if they do not comply with compliance guidelines, including significant fines. The banking sector in the European Union is now almost drowning in such regulations. A solid cybersecurity policy has therefore become a must for today's organization. And to set that up, you have to be aware of the real threats."

Do you want to know exactly what they are? Then read the next blog post in this series! In it, Dennis identifies the four elements of the threat landscape that are relevant today.

Also watch this webinar, in which Wortellers talked to external experts to discuss the threat landscape in the Netherlands in the light of the NATO summit, which took place in June 2025.