Top cyber risks Kenyan businesses face are email attacks

Email attacks, such as phishing and spamming, are now the top cybersecurity threat facing Kenyan businesses, according to a new report.

According to the pan-African cybersecurity report titled ‘The Evolving Cyber Security Landscape in Africa 2022′ published by technology firm Liquid C2, 68 percent of the local businesses that responded to the research identified email-based attacks as the greatest threats to their online existence.

According to the report, which looked at the cybersecurity landscape in 2022, data loss and recovery, unauthorized access to organizations’ information systems, and theft of sensitive data are still the top concerns for Kenyan companies with online presences.

“Ninety percent of Kenyan businesses have experienced a data breach in the past year. 82 percent of Kenyan businesses said cyber security threats had increased over the past year,” the report notes.

Google is second in popularity among cloud-based services used by Kenyan businesses, with 62 percent of the market, followed by Microsoft Office at 72 percent. Online meeting tools like Zoom, Teams, and Skype are used 60 percent of the time.

The report points out that advanced endpoint protection measures like firewalls, data backup, secure VPN and remote access, and web and email content filtering are among the strategic interventions business operators are putting in place to mitigate cyber threats.

The information supports that provided by the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA), which revealed in its third quarter sector statistics report that there were 187.8 million total cyberthreats identified during the three-month period, of which 26.4 million were malware attacks.

When hackers jam systems, it results in DDOS attacks that render operations unusable until a ransom is paid.

Due to Kenya’s highly digitized economy, which is connected to mobile money through telcos and banks, the nation has become a target for cybercrime and online fraud, with banks suffering yearly losses of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Malware that steals money from people and businesses includes viruses that are created and designed to retrieve financial information.