Seventeen minutes. That’s how long a typical cyberattack in South Africa lasts. And one in 214 emails sent in the country last year was a phishing attack. If that wasn’t bad enough, the nation has the dubious honour of being the most cyber-attacked nation on the continent, and South Africans lose more than ZAR2.2 billion annually to internet fraud and phishing.

Speaking at the recent Security Summit held in Johannesburg, Ignus Swart from the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research said the effectiveness of phishing increases from 3% to 70% when personal information is included. Africa itself has experienced a 150% increase in the number of distributed denial of service – or DDoS – attacks in the last 18 months.

16 June 2015
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