Cybersecurity Africa
Financial Phishing Cyberattacks Significantly Increase in Kenya and Nigeria in Q2 of 2022
Emad Haffar, Head of Technical Experts at Kaspersky. According to Kaspersky’s Financial Cyberthreats report, attacks in the financial sector are becoming increasingly corporate-oriented and shifting away from consumers. Kaspersky (www.Kaspersky.co.za) Security Network data shows that the number of financial phishing attempts in the African regions increased significantly from Q1 to Q2 of 2022. Banks, payment systems, and e-commerce websites were attacked. Financial phishing is a deceptive way of stealing information and is gaining momentum in the region. Phishing is a type of online fraud where the scammer sends fake alerts from banks, e-pay systems and other organisations to trick consumers into sharing their financial details. The alerts sent by the scammer can be related to loss of data...
SA’s Cybersecurity Professionals Feel They’re “Losing Ground” Against Cybercriminals – Study
Image sourced from Pixabay Less than 40% of South African security operations (SecOps) professionals are very confident in their ability to adapt to new online threats, with 34% only somewhat confident. While 18% are not confident in their ability to deal with continuously evolving threats, over 10% are undecided. This was part of a global research study released today by Trellix, the cybersecurity company delivering the future of extended detection and response (XDR), revealing the cost of siloed security, weak spots in protection and lack of confidence amongst SecOps teams. “Although South Africa is slightly ahead of the curve (relative to the global average) in its preparedness to deal with attacks, the number of threats is fast increasing, along with the stakes that attackers are playi...
Malware That Steals Credit Card Details Targets South African & Kenyan Gamers
Sourced from Tech Advisor In the first half of 2022, Kaspersky researchers detected increased activity of cybercriminals abusing gamers. Globally, the number of users attacked by malicious software, which gathers sensitive data and spreads under the guise of some of the most popular gaming titles, has increased by 13% compared to the first half of 2021. In attempts to download new games from untrustworthy resources for free, players got malicious software instead, losing their gaming accounts and even funds. These and other findings are part of the report of the gaming-related threat issued by Kaspersky. To assess the current landscape in gaming risks, Kaspersky experts observed the most popular PC and mobile games-related threats. Globally over the year (from 1 July, 2021 to 30 June, 2022...
Liquid Networks Launches DDoS Security for African Businesses
Image sourced from Insurance Chat. Liquid Networks, a business of Cassava Technologies, a pan-African technology group, today announced the launch of its Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Secure offering to its customers. The solution is designed to proactively mitigate attacks by scrubbing traffic and blocking known attackers or malicious traffic. “Cyber Attacks are at an all-time high; cyber security threats cost the African GDP almost a whopping US$4.1 billion in 2021. And, DDoS are on top of the cyber security attacks; the staggering cost to our GDP is proof enough that no business can afford to be without a layer of protection against them. While DDoS attacks have evolved over the years, our offering is equally sophisticated. With traffic scrubbed at one of our four scrubbing centr...
Want to Be a Cybersecurity Expert? Kaspersky is Now Offering an Online Course
Sourced from Hypertext Developed by Kaspersky’s own cybersecurity specialists, the course aims to help businesses enhance or even build a security operations centre (SOC) from scratch – and improve SOC and security team skills in threat hunting, incident detection and investigation. The course guides the audience through the SOC structure, threat intelligence, and relevant attacks. The on-demand format and virtual hands-on labs allow training at the student’s own pace. “Enterprises need to bridge the expertise gap and increase the effectiveness of their security operations. While the question of additional investment is always sensitive, online education may be the solution to achieve their goals. Keeping in mind this business challenge, we developed a bunch of expert training courses on t...
iPhone 14: Users Fall For Scams Ahead of the Release of Apple’s New Smartphone
Apple has confirmed the long-awaited new iPhone 14 will be announced to the public on the 7th of September during its global Apple Event in September. Cybersecurity experts at Kaspersky have already found numerous examples of phishing pages, offering to buy the 14 iPhone, but actually designed to empty victims’ bank accounts and steal their Apple ID accounts. Overall, from 10 to 25 August, Kaspersky security solutions detected more than 8,700 new iPhone-related phishing sites. As the iPhone 14 announcement date gets closer, the number of phishing pages has been also increasing. For example, on August 25, Kaspersky experts detected a total of 1,023 iPhone-related phishing pages, which is almost twice the average number of such malicious site detections per day for the period. The number of ...
Decrypting Crypto’s Potential in Africa
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Fraudsters Launch Phishing Attacks on Universities
With universities becoming more concerned about their networks’ cybersecurity, attackers find ways to breach these systems by targeting inattentive students, staff and professors. Experts from Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky highlight intensified phishing campaigns with fraudsters exploiting the names of some of the worlds’ biggest universities. As the seasonal change marks the start of a new school year for many markets around the world, this aptly dubbed “back to school season” is traditionally a profitable time for fraudsters as millions of students are getting ready to make tuition payments, or purchase school supplies and new books. University-specific phishing pages are usually well-crafted and mimic official university webpages or online learning management systems. Once users ...
How AI & Machine Learning Can Provide Defense Against Cybercrime
Nowadays, threat actors are leaning on new tools and techniques to improve the efficiency of their attacks. Only artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning move quickly enough to defend organisations in this evolving cyber threat landscape. “In the past three months, we’ve been seeing more speed and speed can kill,” says Derek Manky, Chief Security Strategist & VP Global Threat Intelligence at FortiGuard Labs. Threats have been getting into a system, hitting the targets, exfiltrating data, demanding ransom, and getting out of a system, much quicker than normal. This includes attackers capitalizing on new vulnerabilities, zero-days and n-days. They also appear to have become more aggressive, with double extortion, triple extortion and targeted attacks. “Their approaches are more ...
Microsoft Office Vulnerabilities Used to Attack African Users – Report
Russia-based internet cybersecurity firm Kaspersky says that the number of exploits for vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Office suite increased globally compared to Q1 2022. In Q2 2022 these exploits accounted for 82% of the total number of exploits across different platforms. This is according to the latest Kaspersky quarterly malware report. The firm says that the META (Middle East, Turkey and Africa) region also saw an increase in the attacks via MS Office vulnerabilities. MS Office vulnerabilities CVE-2021-40444, CVE-2017-0199, CVE-2017-11882 and CVE-2018-0802 were used by criminals most often during the second quarter, being exploited to attack more than 551,000 users in total. These attempts recorded in the report were countered by Kaspersky’s solutions. The company says that if the ...
Malware That Can Take Over Computers is Skyrocketing in Africa
Sourced from Tech Advisor According to data collected by Russia-based cybersecurity provider Kaspersky, the number of backdoor computer malware detected in Q2 2022 for corporate users in South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria has significantly increased compared to the previous quarter. Currently, numbers are hitting new records and posing challenges to cybersecurity professionals in enterprise and government agencies. “Backdoors enable a series of long unnoticed cyberespionage campaigns, which result in significant financial or reputational losses and may disrupt the victim organisation’s operations. Corporate systems should be constantly audited and carefully monitored for hidden threats,” comments Dr Amin Hasbini, Head of Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT), Middle East, Türkiye and Afri...
Cybersecurity: Africa’s SEACOM Joins Forces with British Telecommunications
SEACOM acquires Africell Uganda Assets to Continue Expanding its East African Footprint African cable system firm SEACOM and British Telecommunications (BT) today announced a strategic partnership which will provide SEACOM with BT cybersecurity systems in order to further secure its own infrastructure and deliver new networking, security and communications solutions to enterprise customers in Africa. As a leading Internet connectivity supplier that owns Africa’s most extensive ICT infrastructure, SEACOM will be leveraging BT’s services, vendor relationships and global expertise to expand its portfolio of services aimed at African businesses. SEACOM’s customers are set to benefit from access to BT’s Cloud Security Incident Event Management (SIEM) platform. In today’s business environment da...
