CELEBRATING SAFER INTERNET DAY

ON February 6, 2024, the world celebrated Safer Internet Day aimed at making both individuals and companies more aware of the ever-more rampant cyber risks that they could fall foul of.

The Bloggers of Zambia were among the stakeholders who had put in place activities to celebrate the day, being aware that the digital landscape continues to play an increasingly integral role in daily lives and businesses.

Safer Internet Day provides a platform for all citizens to reinforce its commitment to online safety and empower Zambians with the tools they need to navigate the digital world securely.

The goal is to equip Zambians and the public, including businesses around the world with the knowledge and skills needed to protect themselves and their communities from online threats.

Businesses as they celebrated this day were made aware that they should make no mistake as cybercrime is a particularly serious threat to all of them.

Truth is cyber-risks for companies have shifted from the Covid-19 lockdown stage when employees were compromising company Information Technology (IT)- and cyber-security while working from home and on unsecured networks.

So then, what are the dangers of cyber risks to companies? Businesses face significant financial losses as a result of a security breach.

Cyber threats/risks are evolving rapidly, outstripping the capacity of security systems.

Some common cyber-attacks include ransomware attacks, social engineering, Man in the Middle attacks and malware. These come in different forms, delivered in different ways, making them hard to detect.

Most cyber threats rely on human error to breach your security, making your team vulnerable.

In 2023, the world saw that the risk was not even all related to companies shifting their operations and information online and into the cloud, but as now, what is keeping businesses up at night is how to defend against Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven cyber-attacks, which are increasingly sophisticated and have fundamentally changed the game.

Indeed, there is no doubt that AI is opening up entire new worlds of efficiency, productivity and creativity for businesses across all sectors.

The problem, however, is of course that AI is not only available to the good guys, but to the bad guys too.

The world increasingly seeing fraudsters manipulating AI for use in ever-smarter cyber-attacks. These fraudsters are using techniques such as data poisoning, where they manipulate the data that is used to train a company’s AI to sabotage the company.

There are also security risks associated with voice impersonation attacks, where cybercriminals use deepfakes to compromise vulnerable individuals.

Cyber-attacks can have serious financial and business consequences for companies, which makes implementing strong cybersecurity protections a critical step.

The threat of a successful cyber-attack ranks as one of the most significant business risks organizations of all sizes and across all industries face

Nearly every business requires IT systems to function, which has significantly increased the consequences of a successful cyber-attack.

You can agree with me that businesses have become so dependent on technology that the majority of them cannot operate without it.

Cybercrime continues to grow in nearly every way. The number of bad actors is increasing, as are the sophistication of their attacks and the access they have to tools and technologies to help launch those attacks.

Recognising the importance of cybersecurity, enterprise leaders in many organisations have increasingly prioritised it, seeking to implement more rigorous policies, procedures and technologies to defend against cyberthreats of all kinds, data breaches, ransomware attacks, phishing and more.