Cyber attacks are on the increase on the continent and this trend is expected to continue if companies use generation 3 and 4 security to ward off generation 5 and 6 attacks, says Michael Tumusiime, Lead Security Engineer, at Checkpoint East Africa, a global powerhouse in cyber-security.
In Kenya, theNational Youth Service (NYS) and Integrated Financial Management System (IFMIS) were among a host of government websites that were attacked by an Indonesia hacker group, Kurd Electronic Team.
Following on this week’s Life Healthcare cyberattack in Southern Africa, the issue of cyber security has once again been brought to the fore, as businesses and individuals are forced to evaluate whether measures in place are strong enough to withstand major breeches in their security.
Life Healthcare is the third major South African company that has been targeted by hackers this year. In February, Nedbank warned that the information of about 1.7 million clients were potentially affected by a data breach, and the following month chemicals and fertiliser maker Omnia Holdings said its IT infrastructure was subject to a cyberattack. Amongst the other big businesses that have been targeted in South Africa are Johannesburg City Council, Capitec Bank and Telkom. This same week, it has been reported that the Ministry of Public Health of Cameroon was also hacked.
“Businesses must look at threats from an architectural perspective. Considering the many attack surfaces, attackers can now get into environments a lot easier and quicker. We have mobile threats additionally with people working from home, the perimeter has moved therefore you can no longer protect your assets just by using perimeter security. You need to think about the different ways that people access information and the different assets to protect against. Think mobile threats, think about security in the cloud, think about IoT devices and have a comprehensive security approach protecting those. It also helps if you have incidence response plan to help in the mitigation and recovery in case you get compromised, says Tumusiime.”
Check Point has an incidence response team that is able to assist customers by carrying out a comprehensive review of the architecture as well as a forensic audit to figure out how the incident happened and how to make sure that it doesn’t happen in the future.
The consistent threat to companies of this size is due to the nature of cutting corners These institutions are cutting corners around cost and setup of technology and this directly relates to the challenges that they are experiencing, using technology that is not 99.9% bullet proof.
Check Point has the largest threat intelligence repository, and on a daily basis we are scanning millions of attacks and indicators of compromise, providing that intelligence back to our customers and our partners to protect their environment, says Tumusiime.
What happened to Life Health, NYS and IFMIS is not unique, it is something that is happening globally. When Covid-19 kicked off we saw many customers in Europe being targeted with fictitious Covid related emails and domains. Africa has followed closely behind as we are now starting to see these attacks reach our continent.
