Andre Lombaard, Technical Manager: Security at Datacentrix.
At the end of 2021, a report released by the International Criminal Police Organisation (INTERPOL) painted a fairly bleak picture of the cyberthreat landscape in South Africa.
Entitled the African Cyberthreat Assessment Report 2021, the survey highlighted that, while the broader African continent had experienced some attacks against critical infrastructure and frontline services, South Africa was among the countries hardest hit, experiencing around 230 million threat detections in total between January 2020 and February 2021. Comparatively, Kenya and Morocco were subjected to a much lower number of attacks, at 72 million and 71 million respectively over the same period.
In South Africa, 219 million detections were related to e-mail threats, and the country was also listed as the most targeted with ransomware and business e-mail compromise (BEC) attempts. In fact, the INTERPOL report referred to figures from Accenture, which stated that South Africa has the third highest number of cyber crime victims worldwide, at a cost of R2.2 billion a year.
It is clear that local business needs to…
