Are Cybercrimes Readily Reported by South Africans?
Article written by: Yusraa Salie
Have you ever sat and wondered about how frequently cybercrimes take place? The ways it can affect us not just as individuals but as a nation.
In an age of technological innovation and social media the idea that crimes are being committed via cyberinfrastructure is not new. However, the frequency thereof borders on incomprehensible. With over five billion Internet users South Africa was ranked 6th out of the top 20 international cybercrime victims, according to the Internet Live Stats of 2020. Yet even those figures do not account for unreported cases despite state-owned entities having the necessary resources in place. This begs the question: ‘why are cybercrimes not being reported? Read more
SMMEs in sub-Saharan Africa hit hard by cybercrimes
Small, medium and micro enterprises (SMMEs) in sub-Saharan Africa have faced a range of cybersecurity issues in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, with scaling digital capacity exposing SMMEs to threats like ransomware, phishing and supply chain attacks. A recent cybersecurity webinar hosted by the Cybersecurity Capacity Centre for Southern Africa (C3SA) at the University of Cape Town (UCT) shared some insights.
Established in January 2020, C3SA is a cybersecurity research and capacity centre hosted at UCT to increase cybersecurity awareness in the region and implement the University of Oxford’s Cybersecurity Capacity Maturity Model for Nations (CMM) assessment toolkit. The centre is a consortium comprising Research ICT Africa, the Department of Information Systems at UCT, the Global Cyber Security Capacity Centre at the University of Oxford and the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs.
Zainab Ruhwanya, a lecturer in UCT’s School of Information Technology, shared her research during “The sub-Saharan African cybersecurity ‘para bellum’: User data protection and privacy” webinar on 16 February 2021. Read more