Nigeria has recorded a 13 per cent decline within the number of phishing attacks recorded and blocked by Kaspersky within the half of this year, compared to an equivalent period last year.
South Africa and Kenya also recorded a 17 per cent and 48 per cent decline respectively. Phishing may be a sort of social engineering attack often wont to steal user data, including login credentials and mastercard numbers.
Phishing attacks across the African continent have baited unsuspecting victims into delivering bank information, ID numbers and more.
The enterprise sales manager, Kaspersky, Africa, Bethwel Opil said the decline suggested and supported research trends that exposed that cybercriminals became more targeted, focusing their efforts on advanced persistent threat (APT) campaigns in Africa which the phishing threat remains very prevalent.
“The decline doesn’t mean that organisations and consumers can ignore the danger of traditional cybercrime attacks or that phishing also as spam, are still not of serious concern across Africa. Instead, people got to become even more conscious of cybersecurity best practices and remain vigilant to guard their personal and business systems from the danger of compromise,” Opil explained.
He reiterated that phishing and spam remain a number of the foremost effective ways of targeting unsuspecting users and gaining access into corporate systems or compromising personal financial and other information which will be wont to perpetrate fraud .
Giving an instance, Opil said spam constituted almost 30 per cent of email traffic in South Africa and shut to 35 per cent in Kenya in H1 2021.
“The number of phishing attacks recorded in South Africa for the primary half 2021 exceeded a million at 1, 031,006.
“In Kenya, phishing attacks were recorded at 601, 557, and in Nigeria 393, 569. Reaching over two million attacks combined highlights that phishing remains a big threat in Africa and illustrates the importance of ensuring cybersecurity solutions are installed on all connected devices,” he added.