Cyberthreats are an ever looming problem in the Internet-focused life that we are used to in this day and age. We have bodies with a sole mandate of detecting such risks and others that do their best to tackle them so that we remain safe.
According to the latest statistics from the Communication Authority of Kenya for Q4 2018-2019, they recorded a deluge of cyber threats last quarter. Between April and June of 2019, the National KET-CIRT recorded a total of 26.6 million cyberthreat events, which was more than double what was recorded between January and March of this year (11.25 million).
The report says that the reason for such a massive increase in the total of cyberthreat events was due to the “global increase in malware including ransomware attacks during this period.”
The biggest contributor to the swelling of the cyberthreat events statistic was the number of malware events detected. Over 21.1 million incidences of malware were reported, which was almost thrice what was reported the previous quarter (8.8 million).
Other contributors to the huge number include the increase of DDOS/Botnet attacks from 1.1 million in Q3 to 2.3 million events in Q4 and an increase of web application attacks from 1.2 million to over 3 million events in the same quarter.
In addition, the National KE-CIRT issued 16,347 cyber threat advisories, which is a 15.3% increase from the numbers posted in the previous quarter. They issued these advisories to the affected critical infrastructure service providers.
Recently, Microsoft released a report that revealed that Africans are incredibly vulnerable to all sorts of malware attacks like trojans, spyware, keyloaders and more. Countries like Ethiopia recorded the highest malware encounter rates and although Kenya was not as high as its neighbour, it was still far from being as protected as more developed countries.
