To stop companies from sitting on bad news, regulators could implement mandatory, hard-coded notification windows. Current laws like the GDPR already suggest a 72-hour window for reporting breaches to authorities, but enforcement across borders remains messy. A new international treaty could standardize these timelines, ensuring a company can't hide behind jurisdictional loopholes. If a firm loses sensitive training data or user credentials, the clock should start ticking the moment they detect an anomaly, not when their lawyers finish their investigation.
Financial penalties offer another way to force honesty. Instead of small fines that look like mere operating costs, regulators could tie penalties directly to a percentage of global annual turnover. This makes silence more expensive than disclosure. We could also see the rise of "duty of care" statutes, similar to those used in maritime or aviation law. Under such rules, a failure to report an incident becomes a standalone legal violation, regardless of whether the breach itself caused immediate physical harm.
Finally, third-party audits could act as a check. Requanteed, independent security audits would require companies to report vulnerabilities to a central, international database. This prevents the
