Serianu, a cyber security consulting firm, has today released a report on the state of Cybersecurity in Kenya. The report reveals that most individuals and business in Kenya are prone to Cyber attacks as they are not well prepared for such situations.
“Our study revealed that 70% of Kenyan businesses are vulnerable to cybercrime yet most of them remain ignorant of these vulnerabilities. Nearly all internet devices in the Kenyan cyber space are vulnerable to attacks, exposing more companies and individuals to the risk of malicious insiders and cyber criminals,” said Serianu Managing Director William Makatiani.
He went ahead to reveal that you can find at least two vulnerable computer servers and up to 15 infected computers that have already been hacked in most mid-sized organizations with over 70 employees. The report went ahead to reveal that the most vulnerable business are those with low cost home routers, Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) systems and public email servers installed on their servers.
Cybercrime is also costing Kenyan companies a lot of money, Ksh 15 billion to be exact, as the report pointed. This amount is mostly from the private sector as it is hard to get data from the public sector.
“Unlike many governments, Kenya has not established any mechanisms to track and calculate the losses made by public sector organizations to cybercrime,” he said. “This makes them even more susceptible to such crimes such as website defacements and ransom demands from criminals before restoration.”
“Leaving factory default settings and administrator passwords is something that is overlooked due to poor information security training and awareness among employees and the common mwananchi” Paula pointed out. “Hackers have an easy time getting in because they have databases of default settings for these access points, networking devices and servers.”
The report warns that security breaches have become more sophisticated, with many involving attacks from staff. As a result of these emerging complications, the system down times caused by cybercrime attacks are getting longer with the average number of days to detect an attack in many organizations totaling to 120 days, more than double the days it took one year ago. The more complex ones easily take an additional 45 days to resolve.
Revealing the top four sources of these attacks, the report lists the US with the highest number at 20% followed by China, Russia and Venezuela at 19%, 11% and 10% respectively.
