African Cybercrime
Cybercrime: how lessons from SA life can help businesses
Image sourced from Feed Navigator. South Africans have become accustomed to dealing with crime because we have no other choice. Various sources place South Africa near the pinnacle of lists of the highest crime rates in the world. If you are a South African, or someone living in South Africa, you most likely take a number of precautions at home, work and play to avoid falling victim to crime. We know that criminals can, and do, strike at any time and at any place. Rather than do nothing, we adjust the way we do things to minimise or remove our risk of falling victim to crime. From physical measures like burglar bars and electric fences to behavioural changes such as not leaving doors unlocked to intruders, being aware of our surroundings when out and about, to security measures such as pla...
4 Security Loopholes Have Been Found in Microsoft Office Apps Including Excel, Word
Sourced from Wikimedia Check Point Research (CPR) urges Windows users to update their software, after discovering four security vulnerabilities that affect products in the Microsoft Office suite, including Excel and Office online. The loopholes were found in sections of legacy code, the vulnerabilities could have granted an attacker the ability to execute code on targets via malicious Office documents, such as Word, Excel and Outlook. Malicious code could have been delivered via Word documents (.DOCX) , Outlook Email (.EML) and most office file formats. Vulnerabilities are the result of parsing mistakes made in legacy code, leading CPR to believe security flaws have existed for years CPR responsibly disclosed to Microsoft, who then issued fixes: CVE-2021-31174, CVE-2021-31178, CVE-2021-311...
5 House Objects Cybercriminals could Use to Spy on You
It is estimated that there are more 22 billion devices linked to a home internet connection around the world, and research suggests this figure could reach 38.6 billion by 2025. While hyper-connectivity offers countless benefits, it also increases the number of available attack points to hackers and invisible intruders. Check Point research warns that there are five household objects that are being targeted by cybercriminals to spy on individuals in their own home. “Mobile phones, Smart TVs, computers and toys are just some of the devices being targeted. The number of products that feature a camera or microphone is growing every day, which can become an issue if they are connected to the internet and do not have the necessary security measures in place,” says Eusebio Nieva, Technical Direc...
60% of South African Organisations Fall Victim to Cybersecurity Incidents
Sourced from Forbes Six in ten (60%) organisations from South Africa experienced a public cloud security incident in the last year – including ransomware (25%), other malware (28%), exposed data (28%), compromised accounts (27%), and cryptojacking (26%) – according to The State of Cloud Security 2020 from Sophos. Globally, organisations running multi-cloud environments are greater than 50% more likely to suffer a cloud security incident than those running a single cloud. Europeans suffered the lowest percentage of security incidents in the cloud, an indicator that compliance with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) guidelines are helping to protect organisations from being compromised. India, on the other hand, fared the worst, with 93% of organisations being hit by an attack in the ...
Cybercrime has Increased by 33%, Report Shows
The 100 Days of Coronavirus report – published by Mimecast – shows that the volume of malicious and opportunistic cybercrime has increased significantly by 33% in the period January to March 2020. The new report has found that in the period January to March 2020 monthly volumes of: Spam and opportunistic cybercrime detections increased by 26.3%, Impersonation fraud detections increased by 30.3%, Malware detections increased by 35.16%, and Blocking of URL clicks increased by 55.8%, meaning people are more likely now to click on unsafe links than before the outbreak. Over the months of February and March, as South Africa reported its first case and moved swiftly into lockdown, the Threat Intelligence Team saw dramatic increases in cyberattacks in Sub-Saharan Africa. Carl Wearn, Head of E-Cri...
