The World Cup, Information Privacy, and Data Insecurity in Africa

Kato Mivule | June 8, 2010
With the World Cup fever high, ZDNET published an article showing an increase in cybercrime activities surrounding the World Cup festivities.

Protection tips for the upcoming FIFA World Cup themed cybercrime campaigns – ZDNET
“…With just four days until the FIFA World Cup begins, cybercriminals have already started showing their interest in taking advantage of the event, by launching targeted malicious PDFs/malware serving campaigns, blackhat SEO and fraudulent propositions, followed by lottery winning notifications/letters of claim themed scams. Considering that, these threats and exploitation tactics are prone to intensify throughout the entire event, let’s review some of the most commonly used attack vectors, and discuss the risk mitigation strategies for each and every one of them…”

Spam Volume Prior To World Cup. Image Source: ZDNET

Yet this underscores a major problem in Africa’s I.T Infrastructure, which most of it is insecure not because of a lack of sophistication to handle such cyber threats but a lack of priority.

Most Telecom companies for example do have state of the art technologies that could be channeled to address cybercrime yet none of these resources are utilized in a proactive way.

South Africa as a nation is exceptional in this approach as they have had a considerable investment in research when it comes to Information Privacy and Security.

However, with the exponential growth of the Telecom Sector, and amazing increase in the numbers of youngsters who are signing up for Online Social Networks such as Facebook, Twitter, etc, Privacy and Security can no longer be ignored.

Yet even documented incidences of Africa’s PCs being used as Transits for worms, Trojan horses, and all other cybercriminals need to comprehensively addressed, not forgetting the stereotypical “Nigerian Email” scam.

Yet in a clandestine fashion, African Governments have been known to employ primitive data mining techniques to spy on their citizens to check on all who are criticizing the ‘Village Chief’…

However, Information Privacy and Security should aim at empowering the locals rather than empowering the ‘powers that be’, this can be used to hold the ‘Village Chief’ accountable.