Kenya Lost KES 17Bn to Cyber Crime Last Year

Kenya lost about Sh18 billion ($171 million)  to cybercrime in 2016, four times the average for Africa, according to Delloite’s Telecoms Media and Tech Trends 2017 Report.

The country has been ranked 69th most vulnerable in the Global Treat index out of 127 and 45th in 2015.

Erik van Der Dussen, TMT Leader Deloitte East Africa stated that Kenya has become target of choice for cybercrime with only 96 percent of companies in East Africa spent less than $5,0000 in cyber security.

Uganda lost KES 35 million ($35M) and Tanzania KES 85 million ($85M).

“Kenya pays the highest toll in Africa 0.28 percent of the GDP vs 0.07 percent across Africa. But, still far from Western economies.”

Earlier, in 2016 the Serianu Cyber Threat Intelligence Team in partnership with the USIU’s Centre for Informatics Research and Innovation (CIRI), at the School of Science and Technology Kenya Cyber Security Report 2016 revealed that from 2012 to 2016, “Then, cyber criminals were opportunistic in nature but over time have become more skilled, focused and targeted with their attacks.”

“The top methods used by cyber criminals in the past 4 years were ransomware and database transaction manipulation. In comparison to 2016, the top causes of compromise were malware and social engineering,” part of the report reads.

Serianu estimated the cost of cybercrime in Kenya to be USD 175 million in 2016, an increase from the USD 150 million reported in 2015.

Paul Lee, Deloitte Global Head of TMT Research on the 2017 predictions, he cites:

The active base of fingerprint reader-equipped devices will top one billion for the first time in early 2017 due to its ability to provide a rapid and discreet way, relative to passwords, of unlocking phones and authenticating transactions.

Deloitte Global expects by the end of 2017 the percentage of smartphones or tablet owners using facial, voice, or iris recognition for authentication will be less than 5 percent compared to 40 percent for fingerprint readers.

The report urges financial institutions, retailers in the online commerce and in store commerce, enterprise users, media and government to figure out which additional applications could use fingerprint readers and other biometric inputs to provide rapid and secure authentication.
In 2017 Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, a form of cyberattack, will become larger in scale, harder to mitigate and more frequent.

Summary of DDOS cyber attacks #TMTPredictions pic.twitter.com/hXk3QQZvd4

— Deloitte Kenya (@DeloitteKenya) February 7, 2017

A DDoS attack is aimed at rendering a website or connected device unusable meaning that an e-commerce site may not be able to sell, or a government site may not be able to process tax returns or a news site may not be able to show stories.

The launch of 5G, the fifth generation of cellular networks, will take place this year. “5G is likely to be the most complex and challenging of all generations of cellular network launched so far-it is an integrated framework of multiple technologies,” reads the report.

For 2017, Seriani calls for The challenges faced by Kenya and in essence African countries present great business opportunities for entrepreneurs, researchers and vendors. In order for us to stay ahead of the threat curve, we need to continually invest in research, build local cyber threat management infrastructure and enhance our ability to anticipate, detect, respond and contain information security threats. In our current state, we are unable to build these capabilities.

Related: Internet Growth in Kenya Key to Social Media Activism