Cybersecurity remains central as African organisations digitise operations
Every system a company moves online also becomes reachable by someone who wants money from it. Digitisation brings real efficiency and a matching expansion of the attack surface, and most organisations add systems faster than they add the people responsible for securing them.
The attacks that succeed are boring
Spectacular intrusions get attention. Sustained losses usually come from ordinary weaknesses: a shared administrator account, an unpatched remote access tool, a credential reused from a personal device, an employee who has never seen a phishing simulation.
- Enrol every remote access path in multi-factor authentication, including vendors.
- Restore from backups you have actually tested, and keep one copy offline.
- Agree an incident response path before you need it, including who tells customers.
Fraud has gone digital at both ends
Social engineering is now the entry point in the majority of reported intrusions. Attackers research targets, impersonate suppliers convincingly and target the finance team specifically, because payment instructions are the fastest route to value.
The cheapest security control is a phone call back to a known number.
Treating it as a business function
Security budgets that report themselves as a percentage of IT spend tend to be underfunded. Frameworks that map risk to business services, with owners who are accountable for uptime and data integrity, tend to be better funded and better understood. The distinction is not technical, but it determines the outcome.
