Tag: cybersecurity

As the country goes into a three-week lock-down to combat the national COVID-19 outbreak, businesses and employees across South Africa are putting the necessary measures in place to operate remotely.

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.

The task of re-skilling millions of workers may feel overwhelming. By 2022 alone, 75 million jobs will probably be displaced across 20 major economies, while 133 million new ones will spring up in industries that are only just gaining traction. At the same time, it’s estimated that nearly two-thirds of children who started school in 2016 will go on to have jobs that don’t yet exist.

Renowned French philosopher, Paul Virilio once said; “When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck.” How inevitable is this in technology today? Security professionals are having to work hard at putting in measures, best practices, mapping systems, lighthouses and beacons in order to reap the benefits of new innovations, all while managing potentially catastrophic risks.

Cybercrime attacks are accelerating in frequency and increasing in sophistication every year for one simple reason – they are highly lucrative when successful, so the payoff is worth the effort. In 2019 we saw a number of high-profile attacks in South Africa, which made headlines for the sheer disruptiveness they created.

With data breaches hitting headlines daily, security professionals are constantly concerned about the next big threat. Whether it’s ransomware, phishing or endpoint attacks, there’s always something on the horizon waiting for its turn in the spotlight.

South African enterprise is no stranger to the phenomenon of cybercrime. In light of numerous high-profile data breaches, it is evident that digital espionage is on the rise. In fact, the South African Banking Risk Information Centre (Sabric) estimates that South Africans lose R2.2bn to internet fraud and phishing attacks annually.

With estimates that between 30,000 and 50,000 drones are currently being operated in South Africa unmanned aerial vehicles have punched a gaping hole in existing physical and IT security strategies.

The demand for cybersecurity solutions is growing rapidly, businesses around the globe are investing heavily in security. Annual global cyber losses are expected to hit US$6 trillion by 2021, with cybersecurity spending projected to exceed a total of US$1 trillion for the five years leading up to 2021.

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.