cybercrime
Kenya’s IEBC Denies Servers Were Hacked to Steal Personal Details from 61,000 Voters
Image sourced from Brookings.edu. Kenya’s Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) has refuted claims that hackers infiltrated its servers and obtained the personal details of at least 61,000 registered voters. This comes after reports from the Directive of Criminal Investigators (DCI) were released, saying that the directive has arrested a 21-year old fraud suspect claimed to have allegedly hacked into the IEBC’s servers. Only identified by the alias ‘Kiprop’ by the DCI, the suspect is said to be the mastermind behind a high-tech mobile phone scam syndicate that has been stealing millions of dollars from M-Pesa agents across Kenya. DCI’s Report According to Nation, the DCI claim that Kiprop gained access to IEBC’s database and stole the personal details of 61,617 registered ...
Microsoft Acquires Cybersecurity Startup RiskIQ as Ransomware Threat Looms
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33% of Companies Undergo Cyberattacks Twice a Month on Average, per Report
Sourced from International IDEA The Hiscox Cyber Readiness Report 2021 provided some concerning statistics and facts about the impact of cyber-crime. It is a game, and it is one that Hiscox fundamentally believes no business should leave to chance. Multiple threat vectors and variable threat actors, and, perhaps most worrying – repeated attacks on companies by cyber-crime pose a serious risk to organisations small and large alike. One-in-six of all firms attacked this year (17%) said the impact was serious enough to ‘materially threaten the solvency or viability of the company’. According to Anna Collard, SVP Content Strategy & Evangelist at KnowBe4 AFRICA, the report underscores the immense challenge that organisations face when it comes to securing the business and the people within ...
Surging DDoS Attacks Drive Growing Demand for Third Party Protection Services
Image sourced from Shutterstock. As the global workforce largely shifted to work-from-home in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, reliance on online services soared. Many businesses were able to successfully pivot to this new normal as remote connectivity allowed access to vital systems and data. But as is often the case, no good deed goes unpunished. As the latest NETSCOUT Threat Intelligence Report shows, cybercriminals have exploited new vulnerabilities created by remote work across a wide variety of vertical industries. Making matters worse, perpetrators no longer have to be particularly technology-savvy in order to pull off attacks. Today, it is easy and relatively inexpensive to access sophisticated attack tools via for-hire services: A cottage industry has sprung ...
Inside the Mind of Cybercriminals – How Threat Actors Think
Cybercriminals come in many different flavours, but the majority of them are in it for one thing: financial pay-off. They want the money that comes with offering their tools or services, selling stolen data, extortion like ransomware or plain fraud. And they all have one thing in common – your organisation is on their radar. This is why, says Anna Collard, SVP Content Strategy and Evangelist at KnowBe4 Africa, it is critical to understand how cyber criminals operate, the tools they use and the approaches they take to embed robust security within the organisation. “With ransomware going rampant and victim organisations paying up to millions of U.S. dollars to the extortionists, this problem is just going to get worse. The U.S. government recently announced that ransomware is a national cybe...
Why Hospitals Are Such Lucrative Targets for Cybercriminals
Image sourced from Alpine Security. Ransomware attacks are on the rise. After a surge in remote working and with employees accessing organisational networks in ways that aren’t always perfectly secured, cybercrime has spiked over the past few months as malicious parties have taken advantage of the sudden move to life in lockdown. Opportunistic hackers have found a particularly tender target to focus on: hospitals and healthcare providers. Across Europe, hospitals are being taken down on a far too regular basis, causing IT systems to fail – sometimes with fatal consequences. Of all the industries to attack, why healthcare in particular? While all organisations suffer when cybercrime strikes, with lives at stake cybercriminals know hospitals can’t afford any downtime. This means those in the...
PoPIA Deadline Extended – Information Officer Registration Portal Broken
After a series of technical glitches with the Information Regulator’s registration portal for information officers looking to achieve compliance with the PoPI Act, the 1 July 2021 compliance deadline has been scrapped. In a statement released on Tuesday, the Information Regulator said that this decision is also based on numerous concerns raised by responsible parties regarding the registration process. “The regulator is currently looking into alternative registration processes and will communicate this in due course. We understand that our portal malfunctioning has caused a lot of anxiety and panic and for that, we really do apologise,” Information Regulator chair Pansy Tlakula said. Deadline Extended by 1 Year With this, the regulator has extended the applications for prior authorisation ...
Remote Working Leads to 78% Increase in Cyberattacks Worldwide
Even though social media platforms are flooded with news of companies proudly presenting the fact that they are permanently shifting to a remote-work environment, they usually do not mention the fact that the pivot has created major issues for their security. Unpatched personal devices, erratic employee behaviour, and inadequately protected home networks create many loopholes for threat actors to exploit. What the Stats Say Carbon Black, a company that provides workload protection services surveyed 3,542 CIOs, CTOs, and CISOs to find out if WFH (work from home) resulted in an increase in cyberattacks. Respondents were from various industries and 14 different countries. The survey was published in June 2021. The study shows that a whopping 96% of enterprises in France saw a significant incr...
EFCC to file 800 new corruption cases in court
The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, has said it is set to file 800 new corruption cases in court. The chairman of the commission, Abdulrasheed Bawa, said this Thursday as part of the weekly briefing by Heads of MDAs to give an update on their performance in office. He addressed State House reporters in Abuja. He said the cases to be filed will border on public corruption and cybercrime. The cases were delayed largely because of the strike by judiciary workers who shut down courts in Nigeria for over two months and only recently suspended the strike. At the event, Bawa also vowed that former Abia governor Orji Kalu “will be prosecuted all over again.” Newsmen reported how Kalu was set free by the Supreme Court on technicalities after being convicted of stealing billions of n...
Cybersecurity Is More than A Tech Problem – It’s a Business Problem Too
Image sourced from Finance Times. A concerning number of South African companies are not prepared for the inevitability of a cyberattack despite the significant financial and reputational risks, according to Ryan Mer, MD, eftsure Africa, a Know Your Payee (KYP) platform provider. “Too few senior managers view cybersecurity as a business problem and not just a technology problem,” he says. “The reality is cybersecurity is very much a business consideration. CEOs and CFOs will eventually face critical questions such as: How much money do we spend on cybersecurity? Do we change key processes? How do we create awareness and change company culture? Do we put security ahead of operational functionality? What is the role of internal processes and staff on data security and integrity?.” Mer adds t...
Confidential Computing – Why Privacy Should be the Heart of Digital Experiences
Image sourced from Intel. In this past year, the consumer experience came to the forefront. As we faced various stages of lockdowns, we turned to online banking, seeing our doctors remotely, running our businesses using technology and socialising through a screen. Digital interactions became a part of our lives – ever-present and normalised as we navigated changes swept in by this pandemic. As our digital interaction became seamless and permeated through every aspect of our lives, privacy continued to be top of mind. We carried out our lives predominantly online – making many of us more vulnerable to fraudsters. As we navigated living our lives digitally, data theft dominated 2020 as the most common attack in the Middle East and Africa. Across the region, data theft and leaks accounted for...
