CYBER SCAPE AFRICA | Q2
2019
CYBER
RISK
MANAGE-
MENT
An African Perspective
Africa has witnessed a steady growth in the
access to Internet enabled devices and internet
penetration has grown steadily from 2.1 % in
2005 to over 24% in 2018 . This represents
millions of its 1.2 billion population. The increase
and the projections for the years to come show
that there is progressive growth in internet use
on the continent. These attacks do not disfavour between the
companies to attack because companies of all
sizes and in all industries globally are victims of
cyberattacks . Therefore, African businesses and
companies should strengthen their cyber-risk
protection schemes in order to prevent financial
loss and distrust from its customers, and
generally on the African economy .
Due to the steady increase in Internet
penetration and the proliferation of Internet
enabled devices, across Africa, companies and
government are becoming digitalised and as a
result, they are vulnerable to cyber threats.
Cyber-attacks are on the increase, the scale is
getting bigger and the more expensive. There is a
great need for organisations to manage cyber risk
because cyber-attacks are imminent, increasing
and are becoming more excruciating. Furthermore, the importance of cyber risk
management in an organisation can never be
overemphasised as risk management is a
continuous process of identifying, assessing and
responding to risk . In managing risk,
organisations must analyse the possibility and
potential impact of an event and determine the
most effective approach in dealing with the risks:
acceptance, transference, avoidance, mitigation
of risks.
In fact, some organisations in Africa have suffered
severe consequence of cybersecurity breaches
such as; data exposure, sophisticated malware on
a network, defacement of websites, identity theft
and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS).
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