The photos displayed for the gathering of military leaders were alarming. One showed a still from a TikTok video claiming that French fighter jets had bombed the Ivoirian Air Force. Another post declared that Côte d’Ivoire’s chief of army staff had died.
Both were lies.
“As you can see, he is not dead,” Maj. Guéable Hervé Zeni of Côte d’Ivoire said, gesturing to his commander, who was seated in the audience at the African Land Forces Summit. “He is here with us.”
As chief of the Cyber Defense Office of the Armed Forces of Côte d’Ivoire, Zeni leads a team that identifies threats and works with other government agencies and private sector stakeholders to respond to them. He said the pace of attacks and false information spreading online is relentless.
“In Côte d’Ivoire, the threat is concrete, and it is real,” Zeni said. “We are living with it every day.”
Zeni shared lessons learned with more than 40 land forces commanders and other leaders who attended the annual ALFS, which took place in April in Accra, Ghana. He said the military response to cyber threats must respect three principles: neutrality, transparency and collaboration. The final principle means that for a response to be effective, the military must coordinate with civil authorities, cybersecurity experts, and the media to swiftly alert the public about cyberthreats and correct false information spreading online.
“We must take actions in coordination with civilian stakeholders so the response can be coherent,” Zeni told attendees.
Some commanders said they had first-hand experience with threats to national security from the spread of false and malicious information online. Brig. Gen. K.T. Sesay, chief of Army staff of Sierra Leone, recalled a social media campaign in his country led by a disgruntled former soldier living abroad who tried to launch a military coup.
Sesay said the experience showed him it is incumbent upon the military to be aware of what is being spread through cyber channels because it can quickly spill into the real world. “It has to be our problem, because when the unrest comes it is our problem. We don’t sleep,” Sesay told ADF.
Africa is a global hot spot for cybercrime of all types. In 2024, eight African countries were among the top 20 experiencing the most cyberattacks globally. The most targeted sectors were education, government and telecommunications.
High-profile attacks in 2024 hit the South African National Health Laboratory System, the Bank of Uganda and Cameroon’s national energy company, Eneo. A website run by the U.S. government (https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories) offers alerts and reports on the latest cyber threats occurring globally.
At ALFS, experts said that an increasingly connected battlefield offers opportunities to the warfighter but also opens up vulnerabilities. Many militaries now have information fusion platforms where troops can view a common operating picture that is updated instantaneously from numerous data sources. But Dr. Kester Quist-Aphetsi, chair of the National Cyber Intelligence and Cyber Defence Research Project in Ghana, warned that digital safeguards are not keeping up with battlefield technology.
“Hackers can hack into your system and communicate as you to your troops if you don’t have your network systems critically secure,” Quist-Aphetsi told ALFS attendees. “In our part of the world, we don’t have most of our systems and communications on the field secured using advanced cryptographic protocols.”
Attendees stressed that any individual Soldier without proper cyber awareness can leave the door open for an attack. To be effective, awareness training must begin in the academies and during basic training and be reinforced throughout a Soldier’s career.
“The best way to handle this is to ensure our troops are well versed in cybersecurity,” said Col. Kwesi Ayima, chief coordinator of the Ghana Armed Forces Command and Staff College. “At the end of the day it’s the human interface that makes the difference.”
