ADF STAFF
Africa’s rapidly evolving online environment is outpacing the continent’s cybersecurity efforts, creating the potential for an event experts refer to as “cybergeddon.” This worst-case scenario would include an assault on computer networks that could cripple power and water systems, financial networks and, ultimately, a country’s national security.
The good news is that African countries’ risk of such an attack is relatively low at the moment. The bad news is that the threat increases with every new computer terminal and mobile phone connection.
A plan to defend against cybergeddon needs to be part of every country’s cyber strategy, according to Noelle van der Waag-Cowling, strategy and innovation officer at South Africa’s Cyber Security Institute.
So far, cyber warfare amounts to 90% espionage and 10% direct attacks intended to cause harm, according to van der Waag-Cowling. However, as more and more crucial infrastructure connects to the internet, the likelihood increases that the ratio will change.
“The main utility of cyber warfare is to disrupt and degrade the adversary’s competencies, winning you time and space, which is critical on a battlefield,” van der Waag-Cowling told attendees recently at South Africa’s Africa Aerospace and Defence (AAD) 2024 Conference. “The biggest cyber threat is one that brings down critical infrastructure by attacking single points of risk causing power, water or transport failure.”
The rapid expansion of the internet across Africa means the continent’s online community has more than tripled in a decade, from 181 million in 2014 to 646 million in 2024. The number is likely to double to more than 1.1 billion in the next five years, according to Statista.
That growth has far exceeded the ability of cybersecurity experts to keep up. At the moment, the continent has about 20,000 trained cybersecurity professionals, far short of the 100,000 it needs based on its population.
Africa as a whole spent $2.3 billion dollars on cybersecurity in 2024, a figure that is expected to double to $4.6 billion dollars this year.
Countries need to look closely at their cyber dependency and the degree to which they are prepared to recover from a catastrophic attack against key public infrastructure, according to van der Waag-Cowling.
“The first thing to understand is ‘what are we building and how is it connected?’” van der Waag-Cowling said during a webinar hosted by the African Center for Strategic Studies.
Many of Africa’s major infrastructure projects are developed without connections to the internet. But that is changing rapidly, she added.
In recent years, the African countries with the highest amount of internet use have experienced hundreds of millions of attacks. In 2024 alone, those attacks managed to shut down banking in Uganda, health care in South Africa, and government agencies in Kenya and Nigeria.
As cyberattacks become a weapon in geopolitical struggles, nations must be prepared to defend themselves in cyberspace and on the battlefield, van der Waag-Cowling told the AAD conference.
Cybersecurity experts say good cyber defense requires international cooperation, but that can collapse when cross-border conflicts break out. It also requires national legal structures and security systems that can respond rapidly to attacks.
In Kenya, for example, the national Computer Incident Response Team (CIRT) issued 9.6 million cybersecurity warnings between July and September 2024. During that same period, the number of cyberattacks against Kenyan targets dropped by 42%, from 1.13 billion to 657.8 million, compared to the previous three months, according to the Communications Authority of Kenya.
To fend off a potential cybergeddon event, it’s crucial for African countries to pay close attention to the security of their national internet system and the users tied to it, van der Waag-Cowling told the AAD conference.
“You have to get into the cyber game, but you need a cyber warfare strategy linked to the national security strategy,” she said. “A cyber strategy can’t stand on its own.”
