What Can We Learn From The Cyber Security Issues Of 2018?

The continent of African has a lot of good things going its way. With the growth of the economy in the region comes the resiliency when it comes to cybersecurity attacks, of all the continents of the world, data breaches in Africa for 2018 went down from 0.02%. This is an achievement compared to the rest of the continent which contributed to the 4.4 billion cases of hacks and data breaches for 2018.

Asia has a record of over 50% of all cybersecurity cases worldwide, followed North America, Europe, and South America respectively. Hackers love to attack government institutions and facilities, covering 47.4% (2,101,500,000 records compromised) of all cyber attack cases. The tech giant sector was also not spared, with 20.1% of all cybersecurity incidents involved tech giants such as Google, Twitter, and Facebook, in aggregate, 891,900,000+ of user records were exposed to unauthorized parties’ access due to such incidents.

The retail sector comes next with 13.4% of instances of cyber attacks received in 2018. This quantifies to at least 593,400,000 cases, the retail sector is huge from all-in-one retail chains like Amazon to specific retail business like hotel accommodations. Healthcare institutions come next, with 1.3% of all the cybersecurity incidents last year coming from this sector. Hackers do not care who the victims are regardless of their stature in society. Just like the Singhealth data breach of mid-2018, which was discovered to include the patient’s record of Singapore’s Prime Minister included in the stolen records.

“Technology evolves and needs to be updated. Thus, what is implemented today and guaranteed secure today may not be tomorrow. This is the reason individuals and corporate bodies must have regular security assessment to ensure their technology is in line with the current security trend. as businesses evolve, the processes and operations of managing the business also follow suit. Therefore, as the scopes of operations are put in place to reflect the entire structures on the whole end to improve the continuity and growth of the business, the required structures have to be put in place to avoid loopholes that can be exploited,” explained Eyitemi Egbujule, an African Cybersecurity expert.

African governments and businesses should not be resting on their laurels and begin investing for credible cybersecurity defense posture. Asia and the western nations are easy targets because they have more vulnerable networks and computer infrastructures operating in their location compared to the emerging economies of the African continent.

More and more companies are engaging with penetration testing, as it is the best way to test the readiness of the networks and computers to sustain its defenses against a real cyber attack. Through penetration testing, vulnerabilities are tested and detected in a harmless way, with a detailed report accompanying the process that contains suggestions on how to fix the vulnerabilities.

The key here is the leadership of institutions and companies being aware of cybersecurity concerns, and are openminded enough to understand that cybersecurity issues can never be prevented unless a substantial investment with cybersecurity infrastructure is given its long due review.