The National Cybersecurity Advisor, Albert Antwi-Boasiako has advised that businesses in the country must inculcate the culture of cybersecurity in its operations, in order to avert possible cybercrime incidence.
In an interview at the formal opening session of the climax of the National Cyber Security Awareness Month in Accra on Monday, Antwi-Boasiako said, “create a cyber security culture within your organization, by training your employees because they are the first target for cyber criminals, to use them to get into protected networks.”
People are most vulnerable to cyber-attacks such as unauthorized access to business data, password compromises, skimming of payments and unauthorized transfer of funds, excessive charges, and leakage of confidential data, among others.
Analysis by industry experts based on security audit and forensic investigations identified that, Ghana is at a high risk of losing its financial inclusion potential due to the existing awareness gap regarding the cyber-threats associated with the emerging electronic payment services.
“We need to scale up our efforts to protect our Critical National Information Infrastructure, as well as addressing the existing gaps in our cybercrime and cyber security legislations,” Antwi-Boasiako said.
He further stated the need to intensify our public awareness creation efforts and most importantly, to operationalize the country’s international cooperation efforts in addressing the challenges.
Cyber Attack
A study by the African Union Commission, in collaboration with Symantec in November 2016, found that Ghana is among the top-10 most attacked countries in Africa, behind Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.
This study further reveals that there were more than 400,000 malware incidents, 44 million spam incidents, and 280,000 Bots incidents in Ghanaian institutions.
Loss from Cybercrime
It is estimated that Africa, which has yet to develop a robust digital economy, has lost about US$3.5 billion to cybersecurity attacks over the past few years, whereas Ghana has lost about US$97 million due to cybercrime, according the Criminal Investigation Department (CID).
By Joshua W. Amlanu