In an awake of ongoing and growing cybersecurity threat like the recent "wannaCry" ransomware; I came to think of whether the Namibian government has a system in place to respond to any eventuality. The South African Cybersecurity expert as was interviewed by the NBC National Radio indicated that the creators of the wannacry ransomware could care less about the African data, apparently because African do not have much reliance in data and it is less likely to make them pay the required ransom as they would rather just loose the data, this got me thinking:
Would that mean we truly do not care about data...? Or maybe it mean Africans are so poor that they could not afford the amount being requested by the cybercriminals..? Perhaps the cybercriminals have found out that there is no data worth any possible risk to them...
I will park the above questions for now, let us focus on the "what-if". Because of the dynamics of the internet, the cyber security threats, although intended for specified companies and countries, can also end up risking those who were not initial targets. Since the outbreak of the wannacry ransomware, the internet has been abuzz as many individuals and companies has been warning, cautioning, updating, advising on measures to prevent, mitigate and contain the outbreak. It is easy to conclude that many entities must have been taking internal measures by informing their staff members accordingly. One would not rule out that the private entities in Namibia has been doing the same, but to ascertain that, I made a number of calls to some key OMAs and few private entities to hear their reactions, it was interesting to note that some IT officials did not even knew what I was talking about...
It was however a bit of a relief to find out that the National Broadcaster picked up the signals and made efforts to even call the Cyber Security specialists from South Africa to clarify things (despite that he in a way, painted a picture that we should not be worried much because we are Africans)
It must be noted that "cyber disasters" unlike natural disasters cannot be discriminate, they cannot be foretold and be attributed to certain geographical areas because internet a "global space". I was lucky though be subscribed to The Hacker News who has been constantly updating the public on the latest development about the breakout.
So in the information era, the governments must not undermine such threats and must be well prepared for when data is completely lost of compromised, it is not easy to mitigate the after effects and you might not look forward to international donors as in the natural disaster's case..lol
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