cybersecurity
Why Ransomware is the Greatest Threat to Your Organisation
Ransomware is getting nastier and more expensive all the time and it has affected almost every industry and geography. No one is immune from the threat. In a global ransomware survey conducted by Fortinet, 67% of organizations report suffering a ransomware attack. Even worse, almost half said they had been targeted more than once, and nearly one in six said they had been attacked three or more times. Renee Tarun, Deputy CISO/ Vice President Information Security, Fortinet Inc. The US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) reported that organizations paid out almost $600 million in ransomware in the first half of 2021, which puts the US on track to surpass the combined payouts of the previous decade in a single year. Last year’s attacks on the suppl...
7 Key Security Practices to Teach Your Kids for Online Safety
Image sourced from Pixabay Educating children with the skills they need to protect themselves online can provide great benefits for families. Cybersecurity and digital privacy company Kaspersky shares 7 digital practices that parents can teach their children. In order to survive in today’s Internet world, everyone needs to have certain skills. While adults tend to acquire these skills as new technologies emerge, today’s children are almost born with a smartphone in their hands. It’s up to parents to teach them how to exist in a world that is constantly bombarded with information. Kaspersky experts recommend building these 7 habits for parents to help their children adjust to the Internet: Create a device-free time zone: When children use technology for a long time, they can become addicted...
3 Technologies that are Reshaping the Banking Industry in Africa
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4 Types of Hackers That You Probably Didn’t Know Existed
Image sourced from Pixabay A security hacker is someone who explores methods for breaching defences and exploiting weaknesses in a computer system or network. To the laymen, hackers are known as the bad guys of the internet, but it is way more than that, and there are many types of hackers that you probably have never heard of before. The most common attacks on the internet include malware, phishing, Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attacks, Denial-of-Service (DOS) attacks, SQL injections, zero-day exploits, password attacks, and cross-site scripting. And all these types of attacks are the ones that gave hacking sort of a bad name. According to Kaspersky, MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) became one of the first homes of hacking in 1969. They started out by altering software and hardware...
Why Women Are Underrepresented in Cybersecurity
Sourced from Women in Tech Africa. One of the industries struggling with significant bias and gender stereotypes is cybersecurity. This field plays an increasingly crucial role in our digital world and, as a result, offers many fulfilling career paths and opportunities. However, there are still significant barriers and misperceptions driving the belief that a career in cybersecurity is not for women. While women have been disproportionately impacted by pandemic-driven unemployment (for example, one in four women reported job loss due to a lack of childcare—twice the rate of men), the technology sector was less affected. This was mainly due to their being better prepared to pivot to remote work and flexible work models. As a result, according to a report by Deloitte Global, l...
OT Security – Everything You Need To Know
Image sourced from Twitter: @SmartIndustryUS Most enterprises know that cyberattacks in the information security realm are continuously growing in sophistication, severity and number. However, up until now, many organisations that run plants, factories, pipelines and other infrastructure have paid less attention to the threats they face in the realm of operational technology (OT). Recent global, OT-focused cyberattacks highlight why South African utilities, manufacturers, oil & gas companies and other organisations that run industrial infrastructure would be wise to take note of the growing range of cyber threats faced by their OT systems and infrastructures. In one example, an intruder breached a water treatment plant in Florida in the US. The attacker briefly increased the quantity o...
3 South African Cybersecurity Companies You Should Probably Know About
Image by Darwin Laganzon, Pixabay. Cybersecurity involves the application of technologies, processes and controls to protect systems, networks, programmes, and data from cyber-attacks. Many establishments across the world, including, schools, banks, and hospitals rely heavily on cybersecurity services to protect their data and be safe from cyber-attacks. Everyone who has a computer or access to the internet must at some point know how to protect themselves online, hence the crash course in cybersecurity in your high school, college, or university years. It is not at all inane. In 2019, a cybersecurity company, Kaspersky noted that malware attacks in South Africa had increased by 22 percent in the first quarter of the year compared to the first quarter of 2018, which translates to just unde...
Most Businesses in Africa Don’t Protect Their Full IoT Suite – Report
Image sourced from Feed Navigator. A recent report from internet security experts Kaspersky report that two-in-five businesses (44%) in Africa and other parts of the META (Middle East, Turkey and Africa) region have parts of their IoT infrastructure that are yet to have any protection. Meanwhile, the main barrier for the implementation of many businesses’ IoT projects is the risk of cybersecurity breaches and data compromises. According to IoT Analytics, the global number of connected IoT devices is expected to grow by 9%, reaching 27 billion IoT connections by 2025. With that dramatic rise in connected devices also comes an increased need for security. Gartner highlights that in the past three years nearly 20% of organisations have already observed cyberattacks on IoT devices in their net...
7 Great Security Practices to Make Sure Your Social Media is Safe & Private
Social media provides a world of opportunities for an organization or individual to promote and expand a brand. A powerful form of communication that uses the internet, social media can provide any organization with a strong global presence. Most organizations believe they must have a social media presence because these platforms and apps have billions of users and an audience that could have millions of potential prospects, customers, partners, employees, and advocates. Social media platforms enable an organization’s representatives and its followers to have interactions that involve sharing information, exchanging feedback, and creating content. Balancing “Social” and Security Social media can increase brand awareness and engagement with the public. It allows for a generally less-expensi...
What every leader must know about cybersecurity
Digitization means every single company now is vulnerable to cyberattacks. Cybersecurity has now become a topical issue affecting enterprises and the bedrock of tomorrow’s intelligent business. For enterprises to succeed they have to invest in digital capabilities that are robust and supported by a cybersecurity strategy that is sophisticated enough to ward off any attacks. Join Shelt & IT News Africa for this informative panel discussion around the constant threats enterprises face and what leaders in the industry need to know about building winning cybersecurity strategies for your business that go far beyond avoiding this worst case scenario. This will be followed by a simulation of a hypothetical crisis where the panel gets to discuss and come up with possible solutions. Date: ...
The impact of the pandemic on cybersecurity
Ralph Berndt, Director of Sales at Syrex Even prior to the pandemic, organisations had begun putting in place elements to manage distributed employees whether that be through corporate remote desktop or virtual private networking (VPN) capabilities. However, this was not done at the scale and at a rate required to manage the disruption caused by COVID-19. Suddenly, companies had to deal with the influx of connectivity challenges that they needed to overcome for their employees to remain productive. Furthermore, support teams now had to manage providing access to critical systems, which were mainly hosted on-premises within the relative safety of their own corporate network. In many cases this resulted in companies having to implement more VPN licences to manage these additional external co...
2022 Predictions: 5 Cybersecurity trends we’ll see this year
“Unprecedented” is a word that defined 2020 and 2021. Once the pandemic hit, we saw a record number of businesses implement work-from-home systems to ensure business continuity, remotely and online. With this rise in digital transformation, we’ve witnessed a blurring of the traditional online perimeters needing to be secured. As CrowdStrike notes, today, a company’s network can be on-site, in the cloud, or a hybrid of both, with resources and staff spread across locations. This presents a cybersecurity challenge, giving way to a dramatic increase in exploits. Suddenly, “once-in-a-decade” breaches of the past are now happening monthly, with a laundry list of companies falling victim. This proliferation of cyber-attacks has catapulted the zero-trust security framework into the limelight. Zer...
