News
Critical Infrastructure Sees Most Cyber Incidents Due to Lack of Budget
18% of companies in the Middle East, Turkiye and Africa (META) region have experienced cyber incidents due to insufficient cybersecurity investment in the last two years, according to a recent study by Kaspersky.
Alarmingly, critical infrastructure, oil & gas and energy organisations suffered the biggest number of cyber incidents due to improper budget allocation (60%). And when it comes to companies’ finances, in the META region one-in-five (24%) admit they do not have the budget for adequate cybersecurity measures.
Kaspersky conducted a study¹ to discover the opinions of IT Security professionals working for SMEs and enterprises worldwide regarding the human impact on the cybersecurity in a company.
The research – aimed at gathering information on various groups of people who influence cybersecurity – considered both internal staff, and external contractors. It also analysed the impact decision makers have on cybersecurity in terms of budget allocation.
Insufficient distribution of budget for cybersecurity led 18% of companies in the META region to endure cyber incidents in the last two years. The situation is different for every industry.
For example, critical infrastructure, energy and oil & gas organisations suffered the greatest number of cyber breaches because of the lack of budget (60%). Meanwhile, some industries showed a smaller number of cyber incidents than the META region figure (14%).
The telecommunications sector suffered 25% of cyber incidents due to budget constraints, while transport & logistics suffered 17%, and financial services companies 14% of them.
When asked about the budget for cybersecurity measures, 74% of respondents from the META region said they are equipped to keep up with or even stay ahead of new threats.
However, 24% of companies are not doing so well – 22% report that they don’t have sufficient funds to protect the company’s infrastructure properly.
At the same time, there are still companies without cost allocations for cybersecurity at all – 2% claimed they don’t have a dedicated budget for cyber protection needs.
Many respondents’ companies from the META region are eager to take steps to strengthen their cybersecurity in the next 12-18 months. One of the most popular areas of investment is threat detection software (35%) and training, where 41% of companies plan to allocate budget for educational programs for cybersecurity professionals and 42% for training general staff.
Other popular measures organisations plan to take soon are introducing endpoint protection software (36%), hiring additional IT professionals (39%) and adopting SaaS cloud solutions (34%).
“Today, companies must align cybersecurity investment with a business strategy and consider cybersecurity as one of their business goals. Of course, investments must justify themselves and be effective, so the information security department also faces the task of increasing the ROI of investments in information security and defending investments to senior management or the board of directors.
Also, in addition to reducing mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR), information security is tasked with reducing the cost of a security incident. These challenges can be met through the use of various modern approaches and technologies.
For example, we are investing in developing our SASE portfolio as well as XDR and MDR with integrated AI, Machine Learning, automated detection and response, automated threat investigation, out of the box integrations and much more.
To ensure process transparency and prove the value of our solutions, we also provide C-level dashboards and reports for CISOs, which include information on how many incidents we prevented, how quickly incidents were investigated, and the effectiveness of deployed cybersecurity solutions.
We also highlight customer-specific risks, and show them trends particular to the industry to help them shape their cybersecurity by targeting their defenses around current dangers, and justify investments in the necessary technology.” comments Ivan Vassunov, VP, Corporate Products at Kaspersky.
News
Mutual Benefits Decries Low Insurance Penetration, Seeks Policy Changes
Mutual Benefits Assurance Plc has decried the low insurance penetration in the country, calling for policy changes to increase insurance uptake by Nigerians.
Mr. Femi Asenuga, Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of Mutual Benefits, who made the call at a workshop for insurance journalists, advocated for media support in ensuring policy changes, shaping public understanding of insurance and deepening insurance penetration in Nigeria.
While emphasizing the important role of the media in educating the insuring public on how insurance contributes to economic resilience, he said the ability of insurance journalists to communicate the complexities of insurance in a relatable and impactful way is vital in building public trust and confidence in the industry as well as encouraging more people to embrace insurance.
Asenuga said: “We are far from where we are supposed to be as a country. Nigeria with a population of over 200 million and as the giant of Africa should not only be in theory. As the press, you have a major role to play in changing the narrative of insurance penetration in the country.
The change is not only expected at the consumer level but also at policy making because that is where everything starts from.”
In her presentation “The Role of Insurance in National Development,” Head, Technical Department, Mutual Benefits Assurance Plc., Mrs. Titilayo Akinsiku, highlighted some of the roles insurance plays in national development.
They include, according to her, Risk Mitigation and Financial Stability; Business Continuity and Resilience; Social Welfare and Inclusivity; Risk Management and Sustainable Development as well as Investment and Capital Formation.
News
Thabo Mbeki Tells African leaders to Emulate Relationship Between Nigerian and South African Musicians
Thabo Mbeki, former President of South Africa has advised current African presidents to emulate the impressive relationship between Nigeria and South African musicians.
Mbeki said the African artists have managed to forge a formidable relationship and strong collaborative strategies which has seen them popularise both countries’ entertainment sectors and create wealth for the industry’s participants but the political leaders in Africa are locked in baseless egocentrism and territorialism which prevents generation of wealth amongst African countries.
Mbeki said before now that Africa used to be feared due to a strong pan-Africanism consciousness among leaders and deliberate policy formulations directed towards giving it a force of power.
He, however, regretted that today’s leaders lack such political will, are more Eurocentric and lack clear direction on how Africa should remain a liberated continent.
“Political will to manage diversity is central to the survival of all of the African states because there’s no African state which is not characterized by the diversity of its population now,” Mbeki said at his Thabo Mbeki Foundation premises, Johannesburg while hosting the third cohort of the MTN-MIP Fellows
“And so if you want to keep a continent or a country together, there’s got to be a conscious political decision. There is one outstanding example in this regard – Tanzania.
“When Tanzania was known as Tanganyika, there were two very important decisions under Julius Nyerere to keep the whole country together. One of them was to have one central language.
“Nyerere decided that everybody must speak Swahili and abandon tribal or regional languages. So, everybody speaks Swahili. The second decision was the abolition of the institution of chieftaincy ship. So there’s no chief of this tribe or that tribe.
“These were conscious decisions taken by the political leadership. They wanted to build one nation out of the Tanganyikans, and it’s worked.
“So, because the people of Tanzania have gotten used to being one, even some few years back when some political people, in Tanzania, started resurrecting this matter about tribal identity in order to advance their own political futures, the consciousness one united Tanzania, was strong enough to defeat them.
“So, that’s why I’m saying it’s a political decision here. South Africa is very fortunate in that respect, because you know, the diamond mines, which were first discovered in the 19th century, attracted people from Southern Africa, from as far as Angola among others to South Africa.
“Then a bit later, gold mining came and domestically, there was a lot of movement of people, and social economic development.
“Recall that at the formation of the African National Congress in 1912, one of its principal slogans was to bury the demon of tribalism.
“So since the beginning of the 20th century, you’ve had a political organization whose task was to make sure that all of this algorithm come together so that you see you got to a point before liberation here, if you said in 1960 to the African community here, wherever you are in the country, you say, who’s your national leader? They would say Alberto.
“So, what has happened on the continent is a regression from the kind of pan-Africanist commitment that we had with other earlier leaders on the continent, and the weakening of that resolve has negative consequences like the frosty relationship between South Africa and Nigeria.
“Another is the poor Visa regulation which has made it very difficult for cross border trade.
“And now addressing the challenge is to address the larger political problems. The point is always being made about the relationship between the artists, Nigerian, South African artists, and what they are able to do,” he added.
News
World Bank says 40% Nigerian MSMEs are Owned by Women
A report by the World Bank has established that 40 per cent of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) in Nigeria are owned by women, with most of the businesses growing at a remarkable rate.
In the World Bank latest report released on Wednesday, the global bank, through its Nigeria Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We-Fi), partnership with the Development Bank of Nigeria (DBN) and two commercial banks in Nigeria – Access Bank and Sterling Bank, established development of innovative credit solutions that expanded access to finance for women entrepreneurs.
The report summarizes key lessons, which include initial diagnostic; an assessment of demand for business loans; analysis of SMEs who applied to and/or received Access Bank cash flow loans, and administrative data from Access Bank’s cashflow loan programme.
“Our objective is to provide insights into the successes and challenges of disbursing loans to women-led SMEs (WSMEs) in Nigeria.
This research is being conducted in partnership with the World Bank’s Africa Gender Innovation Lab (GIL), which is also carrying out an impact evaluation that will capture how cashflow-based lending impacts male- vs female-led firms’ access to credit and business performance,” the report added.
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