Allianz Nigeria recommends safety measures as cyber attack heightens

As if the Covid-19 pandemic in itself wasn’t devastating enough, hackers have leveraged the opportunity to attack vulnerable networks as office work moved to personal modes. This is as US FBI has reported a 300 percent increase in cybercrimes cases since the pandemic.

According to statistics, only 51 percent of organizations in Nigeria are confident in their team’s security ability to act and 71 percent have reported an increase in data breach threats since the pandemic outbreak with financial institutions bearing the brunt of each attack.

These were key data from an interactive webinar titled ‘The Ever Increasing Impact of Cyber Attacks: A case for Cyber Insurance’ organised by Allianz Nigeria, in its bid to create awareness and educate business owners on safely measures and how to mitigate these risks.

From the outcome, it was discovered that Cyber risk trends that are likely to affect organizations include - Phishing (55 percent), malicious websites (32 percent), malware (28 percent) and ransomware (19 percent).

Among other highlights from the speakers was the need for organisations to focus not only on cyber security but more on cyber resilience. This entails a fusion of information security and business continuity strategies. In other words, cyber resilience is the ability of an organisation to withstand attacks or failures and in such instance re-establish itself quickly back to operational mode.

To achieve this, a seven fold approach which includes being strategic, building capacity, strengthening the process, automate inform and transform, measure and monitor, cyber insurance and collaboration was recommended.

In an era of unprecedented security risks, companies should determine more pragmatically how they intend to curb these risks and build capacity termed as “human fire wall”. Organisations should create awareness internally, train and educate staff members as a way to minimize the ability of intruders to compromise their information security.

Organisations also need to strengthen their cybersecurity posture across all levels. Every layer of access down to the seemingly unnecessary layer should be tightened as a way to discourage attackers.

In another related remark, there is a need for conducting regular analysis so as to determine the level of exposure and strengths. Cyber-attacks as it stands is dynamic and companies stand a risk of being vulnerable either accidentally or deliberately through its people, processes or the type of technology adopted.