Comprehensive Report on Cyber Security and Cyber Crime in Africa
The African Union (AU) and Symantec, Inc. will engage in a Public-Private Partnership to draft a report that collects and presents detailed technical data on cybersecuritythreats and trends in Africa. The Report will serve as a comprehensive document on cybersecurity matters in Africa, from which Member States of the African Union,and stakeholders worldwide,can draw useful conclusions and gain a fuller understanding of the major cyber trends in Africa, as well as the current capacity to deal with those threats. Moreover, the results of the research will be used to identify the most pertinentincidents and threats of cybercrime on the continent and will serve in the future to guide additional AU/SYMC capacity building efforts to assistAU Member States to develop the key components of a national cyber-security strategy.
The goal of the report is to gain a comprehensive view of the major occurrences of cyber incidents affecting organizations and individuals in the territory of AU Member States. Governments and other interested parties can then utilize this information to strengthen prevention and response mechanisms to confront the diverse range of cyber threats. This report provides AU Members States an excellent opportunity to illustrate and emphasizesignificant advances and victories as well as lessons learned in the areas of cyber security and combating cybercrime.
In recent years, policymakers, technicians and other experts engaged in cyber security in Africa have noted the lack of detailed and reliable threat information regarding cybercrime threats and trends in the region.Such information would be invaluable in assessing and managing cyber risks at both the national and regional levels by providing governments a more complete and nuanced understanding of how criminals and other actors are targeting and exploiting cyber-related vulnerabilities. This report, which will be publically distributed and free of charge, will address this information gap in Africa and provide a complete picture of illicit cyber activity.
As the largest information security firm in the world, Symantec Corporation has access to large amounts of technical data on cyber security incidents in Africa as well as broader global cybersecurity trends. As such, Symantec will compile relevant statistics and make forward-looking observations about the types of attacks being levied against information and communication technologies (ICTs), the modus operandi of the perpetrators of such attacks, and the types of cyber security countermeasures that would best prevent them. All information that Symantec analyzes will be made available to Member States in the final report. The collection of information related to cyber threats in Africafrom Member Stateswill be conducted by the AU througha voluntary country survey/questionnaire.The content of the survey will be agreed upon by AU and Symantec.
The report will assess the major trends in the region in terms of threats to the cyber domain and the potential impact they could have on those that utilizeit—from government institutions to private enterprises, to individual users. It will also take stock of the advances in policy and legal frameworks that government authorities have instituted in order to better address the challenges that they face in an increasingly connected world.Moreover, the project will help establish relationships between the various African CERTS and Symantec so that they can share both aggregate and specific cyber threat information toensure confidence in the use of ICTs and proactively protect African cyber space.