08 Jul 2018

 In an era where the world completely relies on technology and depend on the Internet, it has become imperative for companies to protect themselves from the impact of cyber-crimes, which result in financial losses and reputational damage.

As a result of the foregoing, a South African cyber security company, Goldphish, has partnered with African Cyber Security through the Botswana Innovation Hub, to bring a cloud-based CybAcademy training platform to Botswana.

The platform has been designed to deliver continuous awareness training to employees of organisations that have registered with it.

Delivering a presentation at the launch of the CybAcademy on Thursday, managing director for Goldphish, Mr Dan Thornton emphasised the need to educate employees to improve cyber security as they are the easiest route for hackers to enter their companies’ systems.

He said the Cyber Academy training platform will educate directors, senior risk owners and frontline managers about the emerging risks of cyber incidents on their organisations.

He said this will also transform companies by training employees to identify common cyber-attack methods and techniques to understand how to protect against the insider threat.

Mr Thornton said businesses put a lot of focus, money and resources into their technical control to protect their systems and operations such as putting up firewalls and anti-viruses, which are all critical to keeping the risk low and hackers out.

“However, the people themselves are producing a vulnerability to their organisations as hackers are targeting insiders to gain access to the company’s system. 

They use social engineering techniques through phishing and a number of different scams in order to try and convince employees to provide them with data to download malware and disrupt their systems,” he said.

He further reiterated the need for companies to see a large focus on managing cyber security through Cyber Security Awareness and changing employee security behaviours in their organisations so that they “become the company’s human firewalls”.

For his part, director of Cluster Development for Botswana Innovation Hub, Dr Budzanani Tacheba, said there were a lot of developments taking place in the technological space. He said as such, cyber-security had become a strategic area in the country’s economy as almost all developments taking place had to go through the cyber platform.

Dr Tacheba noted that with the recent advent and utilisation of the cyber space, there was always going to be opportunities for hackers to try to gain access to companies’ systems and steal their money, so organisations should be consistently aware of such attacks and stay ready for them. Through its Cybaware Awareness campaign, the academy will provide users with a full spectrum of awareness education delivered directly to employees to educate and empower them. 

Furthermore, in order to help small businesses to tackle cyber-attacks, CybAcademy has made it its mission to distribute free cyber-security awareness training to small organisations with annual revenue of up to P10m. BOPA