South Africa:Insurance, finance and retail most at risk from cyber crime

An increase in cyber attacks by criminals taking advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in new structural and operational risks, with insurance, finance and retail sectors the most targeted sectors in South Africa, according to a recently published cyber threat intelligence report.

The most common attacks in South Africa were web-application attacks (66%) and application-specific attacks (27%), said Dimension Data Security managing executive Tony Walt citing data from the '2020 Global Threat Intelligence Report', commissioned by the information technology firm's international parent company NTT.

In the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region, reconnaissance activity, where an intruder secretly gathers information about systems for a future attack, was the most common threat (40% of all hostile attacks), the report showed.

As more businesses embrace working from home, they depend on technology to collaborate with each other and access remote networks, as well as also rely more on web applications like customer portals and retail sites as they shift their channel strategies from face-to-face to online. These kinds of changes increase an organisation’s vulnerability to cyberattacks, said Mr Walt.

He added, “COVID-19 has been a stark illustration to many businesses how cunning cyber attackers will use any entry point they can to exploit a vulnerability. Businesses can no longer just respond to a security event, they need to be able to anticipate and prevent it in all aspects of their operations, including technology, people and controls.

“This is what cyber resilience is all about. Rather than viewing cyber security as solely a protective layer over a business’s operations, secure-by-design means including security as a key and conscious deciding-factor in the design of any end-to-end business solution and having intelligence to help the business identify the threat earlier to respond, recover and return back to business as usual much more quickly.”

Source: Middle East Insurance Review