Cyber Threats: What Security Sector Leaders Must Know – Nathaniel Allen
Channel: Africa Center for Strategic Studies
Date: 2023-06-13

Presentation from Session 5 of our Emerging Security Sector Leaders Seminar

With the rapid spread of digital technology across the African continent, cyberspace is becoming an increasingly important security domain. A growing number of African citizens are falling victim to online fraud, theft, and extortion perpetrated by organized, and increasingly globalized, cyber-enabled criminal networks. Africa’s critical infrastructure, essential to the continent’s future prosperity, is becoming vulnerable to cyber sabotage, evidenced by recent ransomware attacks against Transnet, the South African port operator. Expanding telecommunications infrastructure and the proliferation of cheap malware has enabled foreign powers and African states alike transformed the intelligence industry, exposing African states to novel forms of cyberenabled espionage. Social media, open-source intelligence, and unmanned systems are increasingly being deployed by armed state and non-state actors in Africa’s armed conflicts, changing the character of warfare.

The African security sector has a crucial role to play as part of a broader multi-stakeholder approach to cyber space security in Africa – coordinating the protection of critical infrastructure, responding to the most strategically significant threats from organized, armed actors, and in thinking through how best to adapt technological advances into security and military strategies and operations. Yet because information technology is an enabling technology with a broad array of applications, key sources of expertise lie in the private sector, and civil society has a critical role to play in ensuring that digital technology is used transparently and accountably. For the digital revolution to realize its full potential, African governments must adopt a human-centric approach to cybersecurity.

Click here for the Seminar webpage, with recommended readings and panelist biographies:
https://africacenter.org/programs/2023-essl/

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