Calls to up game on cybersecurity

CYBER experts are urging Africa to up its game in the face of criminals targeting the continent’s fast-growing internet economy with scams and theft.

“The issue of cybersecurity has to be raised to the core duties of the state,” Chadian economist Succes Masra said at a cyber conference in Abidjan, Ivory Coast’s economic hub this week.

“If you do that, you will get follow-through. There’s incomplete awareness about this problem, and we have to speed things up.”

Half a billion people in Africa are connected to the internet, according to Interpol – a figure that in raw numbers places the continent ahead of other regions such as South America or the Middle East.

Major attacks on the internet itself are very rare in Africa, the most spectacular being a brief takedown of the web across the West African state of Liberia in 2016.

Instead, say experts, fraud and theft are flourishing, inflicting an estimated economic cost of $4 billion (R64bn) a year.