Tag: cyber threat

The cyberthreat landscape is constantly evolving, as cybercriminals continue to find vulnerabilities to exploit. Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are a growing concern that businesses need to guard against. While these highly targeted attacks are as common as more broadly-targeted events, they are devastating when successful, exposing sensitive data that could ruin business reputation, not to mention causing compliance breaches.

Most African business leaders are more optimistic about the strength of the global economy and their organisations’ ability to grow revenues in the next 12 months than they were a year ago. Although CEOs’ confidence in their own company’s revenue prospects has rebounded, they are anxious, too: policy uncertainty, tax policy, cyber threats and over-regulation are keeping them awake at night.

The wider renewables industry is realising the criticality of cybersecurity in holistic asset resilience. Since many of the systems currently in use were built prioritising efficiency over security, cybersecurity now poses a serious challenge for renewables operators.

2020 witnessed a dramatic cyber threat landscape from beginning to end. Although the pandemic played a central role, as the year progressed cyber adversaries evolved attacks with increasingly disruptive outcomes. They maximised the expanded digital attack surface beyond the core network, to target remote work or learning, and the digital supply chain.

In an accelerated digital landscape marked by ever-increasing amounts of data processed every day, information technology practitioners must navigate through multiple information lifecycle management practices daily to ensure the veracity of business data.

In the modern world, data is regarded as the lifeblood of an organisation. Consequently, cyber threats have taught us that a reactive response to a data breach, regardless of the magnitude of the event, is no longer adequate. All data is important, therefore a more modern and innovative approach needs to be adopted to keeping it safe yet available.

Prior to the pandemic we were seeing the usual scams impersonating banks, telcos, and shipping companies but now a portion of them have switched to using the pandemic, the World Health Organisation, the American Centers for Disease Control and various international and local charitable organisations as bait.

Nature is inherently designed for resilience. The way trees are designed to bend but not break under the weight of high winds, storms, and snow, how they automatically renew and heal each season – we can learn a lot about resilience from nature and it is time for organisations to take a similar approach to cybersecurity.

In 2018, web miners, applications that run in a user’s browser and mine cryptocurrencies for profit, could have consumed as much as 18.8 gigawatts of electric power, according to our research on the economic and environmental impact of web mining. This makes it comparable to the power consumption rate of Poland and means the environmental impact of web mining is close to 800 tons of CO2 emissions.

On a recent visit to BDO in Norway, it struck me that many South African-based businesses and organisations are increasingly exposed to cyber threats and vulnerabilities of which they are blissfully unaware.