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Cybersafe Foundation Partners Google to Strengthen Cybersecurity Among CCIs in Africa

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The Cybersafe Foundation has collaborated with Google in strengthening cybersecurity resilience among Critical Community Institutions across Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and South Africa with the launch of Resilio Africa.

 

Speaking at the event in Lagos, Confidence Staveley, Executive Director of the Cybersafe Foundation, noted that while many organizations recognize the risks posed by cyber threats, conversations often stall when it comes to implementation.

“Across Africa, Critical Community Institutions are facing an increase in cyberattacks often without the capacity to defend themselves. Sub-Saharan Africa is now experiencing some of the most aggressive cyber activity globally. According to a threat report by Kaspersky, the region recorded over 42 million web attacks and 95 million malware-based, on-device attacks in just the first half of 2025.

“What’s especially concerning is the nature of these attacks: spyware, password stealers, and backdoor tools dominate, with password-stealing malware increasing by more than 60%.

“In East Africa, the scale is even more stark. Kenya alone recorded 2.5 billion cyber-threat events in Q1 2025, driven largely by phishing, mobile money fraud, and misconfigured cloud services,” she stated.

According to her, the primary barrier is not a lack of willingness but limited financial capacity to fund adequate cybersecurity measures.

“The conversation drops off at the point of taking action,” she said, explaining that many institutions lack the budgets required to implement robust security systems.

She disclosed that the programme’s provision of 10,000 hours of expert cybersecurity consultation—offered at no cost to participating institutions would ordinarily represent services valued at over one million dollars. The support, funded through a grant from Google.org, will be delivered by specialists across four participating countries.

Staveley reaffirmed that the Cybersafe Foundation remains a non-profit organization focused on supporting vulnerable communities and institutions, and described Resilio Africa as a strategic intervention aimed at strengthening digital trust across the continent, ensuring that commerce and essential public services can operate securely in an increasingly digital society.

Although the programme currently covers Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and South Africa, Staveley acknowledged that the cybersecurity challenges extend far beyond those countries, and expressed hope that demonstrated impact from the initial phase would attract additional funding to scale the initiative to more than the 200 critical community institutions currently targeted, including underserved Francophone nations.

“This work is free to the organizations we serve, but it is not free to deliver,” she noted, underscoring the need for sustainable funding.

Explaining her personal motivation, Staveley said she views Africa’s cybersecurity challenges as opportunities for impact. Despite her engagements on global platforms, she emphasized her commitment to Nigeria and the broader African continent, describing the region as both home and a priority.

She pointed to a growing mismatch between rising cyber threats and limited investment in cybersecurity infrastructure, arguing that bridging this gap is central to the Foundation’s mission.

Staveley also clarified that Resilio Africa will not collect or own user data from participating institutions. Instead, the programme will focus on strengthening internal controls, building capacity and guiding organizations toward improved data protection practices.

With Resilio Africa now underway, the Cybersafe Foundation aims to demonstrate how targeted support for critical community institutions can enhance digital security and build long-term resilience across Africa’s rapidly expanding digital economy.


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E-Business

Kaspersky Uncovers over 250,000 Potential Security Issues in GitHub Actions Workflows

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Kaspersky’s Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT) has conducted a major review of the GitHub Actions workflows within top-starred repositories. Leveraging newly introduced Kaspersky Container Security capability, the researchers have discovered 8 repositories with critical misconfigurations that could lead to supply chain compromise.

Open-source components are now indispensable to modern software engineering. However, they also introduce hidden vectors for supply-chain attacks, such as the prominent Mini Shai-Hulud campaign conducted by TeamPCP in May 2026.

This attack exploited weaknesses in GitHub Actions build pipelines and led to the compromise of more than 170 npm and PyPI packages, affecting projects such as TanStack, Mistral AI, and OpenSearch.

In general, misconfigured GitHub Actions workflows can transform trusted development pipelines into dangerous entry points, allowing attackers to compromise automated workflows, introduce malicious code into production environments, or access critical infrastructure keys.

Kaspersky GReAT experts have completed the assessment of GitHub Actions workflows, analysing more than 130,000 pipelines across 30,000 of the platform’s top starred repositories.

Utilising the specialised scanning ruleset introduced in the latest Kaspersky Container Security update, the researchers identified over 250,000 potential misconfigurations in continuous‑integration/continuous‑delivery (CI/CD) processes, underscoring the widespread adoption of insecure configuration practices. Only 10% of the analysed repositories triggered no alerts at all.

Among the discovered issues 59.8 % are classified as low‑risk, 39.8 % as medium‑risk, and 0.4 % fall into the high‑risk category according to Kaspersky taxonomy.

The most frequent issues involve implicitly granted or overly broad access permissions, missing version pinning for dependencies and workflow‑level settings. Fewer repositories expose top-level secrets, use unsafe run conditions, or process external data insecurely, potentially leading to more severe compromises.

Among 200 repositories identified as high-risk, the team discovered 8 repositories with critical flaws that could lead to supply chain compromise. The affected repositories spanned a wide range of use cases, including AI integration in enterprise environments, developer and automation services and security testing tools. The identified critical issues were reported to the respective developer.

“Over the past year, we have observed serious supply-chain attacks, that could have been prevented by following secure CI/CD configuration guidelines,” said Leonid Bezvershenko, senior security researcher at Kaspersky GReAT. “While the uncovered issues do not automatically indicate exploitable vulnerabilities, they point to areas where developers should verify and strengthen configurations.

“By identifying these weaknesses early, organisations can build more resilient pipelines and reduce the likelihood of supply-chain compromise. The rules developed for our container security solution provide a practical framework to identify and remediate these gaps before they can be exploited.”

To detect and mitigate potential security issues caused by misconfigurations, Kaspersky Container Security users can leverage GitHub repository scanning, whether embedded directly into CI/CD pipelines or operated in standalone mode.


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Kaspersky Transforms Threat Intelligence Reporting into an Interactive Content Hub

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Easy interaction with exclusive Kaspersky reports, geo-filtering and actionable intelligence in a single click: expert insights on Advanced Persistent Threats (APT), Crimeware and Industrial Control Systems (ICS) threats are now available directly in Kaspersky Threat Intelligence Portal — with charts and visuals rendered inline.

In an era of increasingly sophisticated and frequent attacks, threat intelligence inevitably evolves into a business enabler that equips security teams with strategic advantage in their mission to back their company’s stability and growth.

Kaspersky, a recognised leader in threat intelligence, facilitates informed decision-making and proactive risk mitigation by introducing simplified access to actionable and relevant threat insights.

Kaspersky Threat Intelligence Reporting is a subscription-based service delivering over 200 in-depth analysis reports annually. These insights are compiled by Kaspersky’s Global Research and Analysis Team, Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team and Threat Research experts through the continuous tracking of more than 900 threat actors and campaigns.

Following the update, all reports previously representing a library of static PDF files (that is more than 2000 exclusive Kaspersky reports published to date) are now structured and can be examined directly in the Kaspersky Threat Intelligence Portal. For offline use, the standard PDF download format remains available as well.

The update also introduces deeper integration within each report, featuring direct links to indicators of compromise (IoCs), detection rules (including YARA), and MITRE ATT&CK® techniques. Users can now perform a single-click drill-down into specific threat actors, malware families and Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) across diverse geographies and industries.

Smart geo-filtering streamlines investigations by prioritising content explicitly mentioning a selected country, followed by broader regional intelligence, giving analysts a complete geographic view in a single query.

Enhanced Kaspersky Threat Intelligence Reporting supports the following use cases:

  • Customised content discovery: apply geo, industry and software filters to instantly retrieve a list of relevant reports.
  • Exclusive intelligence: access the most recent incident investigation reports, including those without public disclosure, to understand the nature of an attack and identify the actions required for mitigation.
  • Actionable intelligence extraction: extract and apply threat data from the reports and apply it across specific infrastructure to detect traces of compromise.
  • In-depth Threat Lookup and contextual analysis: investigate suspicious indicators identified within the network and quickly determine if a specific IoC is linked to a related threat report.

“Empowering cybersecurity teams in their mission-critical daily work to ensure business resilience in a complex threat landscape. This is the main driver behind our ongoing visual and functional improvement initiative.

While updating Kaspersky Threat Intelligence Portal, we focused on refining the customer experience by optimising processes of active investigation, proactive incident monitoring and detailed mitigation techniques,” comments Alexander Mazikin, Head of Threat Intelligence Product Line at Kaspersky.


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Weebly Websites to Shut Down for Nigeria, 66 Other Countries from September

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Weebly, US-based free, beginner-friendly, drag-and-drop website builder and eCommerce service, will no longer be available for customers in 67 countries, including Nigeria, after September 2026, according to an email seen by Nigeria CommunicationsWeek.

Weebly Websites to Shut Down for Nigeria, 66 Other Countries from September

Weebly said it is “winding down” services in different nations “due to changes in regulation and to simplify our global operations”.

The firm released a timeline of gradual changes, to help existing users access their data before the site shuts down.

Starting June 29, customers of 67 countries were no longer able to publish any new pages.

September 27, 2026: Weebly websites will be unpublished.

Before this date, users should download site content and data. Follow these steps:

Go to Account Settings, click on My Data, and select Download My Data.

This will help you migrate your content to another website provider, or retain it.

Concerned about privacy? Ask Weebly to delete your data, through the Erase Data and Forget Me option under the My Data tab on your account page.

December 26, 2026: Last date of accessing Weebly account.

Until this date, you will have access to the account, although sites will be unpublished.

This period helps users move their site, domains, and data to another service.

Domain names can be moved to another registrar only after 60 days from the registration date.

According to the Weebly website, users must make sure that they do not make changes to your registrant contact information (email, phone number, first/last name), as this will lead to a 60-day registrar lock and prevent you from transferring your domain name.

Note that domain name transfers work differently for country-specific domains; users must contact Weebly’s support team for assistance.

How to unlock, transfer domain name

From your Weebly Dashboard, go to websites, and click on Domains, then select Manage Domain.

Disable registrar lock, get EPP authorisation code, and copy the full code.

Disabling registrar lock will also disable privacy protection. It is important to set privacy protection once again with the new registrar.

Follow the instructions for the newly chosen registrar as the rest of the transfer process will be managed by them

Why is Weebly winding down?

While the firm attributed it to “a change in regulation,” online users have argued that Square, which acquired Weebly in 2018, is pushing its platform ‘Square Online’.

Square is originally a US-based payment processor, and the firm says it has since evolved into the “largest business tech platform”.

It calls Square Online a “free online store” but clarifies that those who do not sell online can also use it to build their websites.

In an earlier support update for the Weebly Website Builder, Square Online was consistently referred to as a better alternative, although at the time, it was said that Square “has no plans to discontinue the Weebly website builder”.

Which countries will Weebly no longer be available in?  Albania, Algeria, Andorra, Armenia, Aruba, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbadoa, Belarus, Benin and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Others are: Cambodia, Cameroon, Chile, Colombia, Congo, Costa Rica, and Côte d’Ivoire.

Also affected are: Ecuador, Egypt, Ethiopia, French Polynesia,    Gabon, Georgia, Ghana, Guinea, Iceland, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Laos, Malaysia, Mauritius, Moldova, Montenegro, Morocco, Nepal and New Caledonia.

The rest are: Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Palau, Paraguay, Peru, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Singapore, South Korea, Suriname, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

 

 


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