E-Business
esentry 2025 Report Shows Healthcare, Financial Services and Telecoms as Staging Grounds for Increased Cyberattacks in Africa

Cyber adversaries targeting African organisations are increasingly shifting away from opportunistic attacks toward deliberate, sector-specific campaigns aimed at the continent’s most critical digital infrastructures, according to the esentry 2025 Annual Report released by esentry, Lagos-based Africa’s leading indigenous Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP).

The report identifies healthcare, financial services, and telecommunications as the primary staging grounds for high-velocity cyberattacks, reflecting a growing focus on sectors that underpin economic stability, public welfare, and digital connectivity across Africa.
The findings are drawn from one of the largest cybersecurity datasets analysed in the region. Over the course of 2025, esentry processed more than 31 billion security events, generating 3.5 million alerts and successfully blocking over 15,000 malicious attempts. This monitoring scale shows that, while traditional financial institutions remain a core target, the threat landscape has expanded to include digital lending platforms, healthcare systems that store sensitive personal data, and telecom operators responsible for national and regional connectivity.
Within the healthcare sector, the report highlights ransomware as the most acute risk, with attackers frequently exploiting exposed Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) services to compromise patient data and disrupt essential medical operations. In financial services, organisations are facing a surge in credential abuse, insider-related threats, and info-stealer malware designed to enable fraud and unauthorised access. Telecommunications providers are increasingly targeted by highly tailored phishing campaigns and attacks on exposed web services, which aim to harvest credentials and compromise customer data.
Commenting on the findings, Gbolabo Awelewa, Chief Business Officer at esentry, said the nature of cyber threats across Africa has evolved significantly. “The threats we are seeing today are deliberate, informed, and carefully tailored to local enterprises. Attackers are exploiting trusted access and moving quietly within networks, which makes early detection critical. Our coordinated cybersecurity model, spanning Defence, Intelligence, Offence, and Security Engineering, allows us to combine scale, speed, and deep contextual insight to detect and neutralise threats before they escalate,” Awelewa said.
A defining trend identified in the report is the shift from overt system exploitation to the abuse of legitimate access. By leveraging compromised credentials and ‘living-off-the-land’ techniques, attackers can blend into routine enterprise operations and significantly delay detection. This approach has compressed the attack lifecycle, enabling adversaries to move from initial access to full operational impact in fewer than 15 days.
To counter this acceleration, the report emphasises the importance of early detection and automated response. esentry says it currently contains low-complexity incidents in under 90 seconds, using a combination of structured threat hunting and centralised telemetry to anticipate and absorb attacker pressure rather than reacting after damage has occurred.
As African organisations continue to digitise, the esentry 2025 Annual Report positions itself as a critical reference point for understanding the continent’s evolving cyber threat environment. The report concludes that protecting Africa’s digital trust will require a shift away from fragmented security tools toward disciplined, coordinated defence frameworks, what esentry describes as a unified Phalanx formation.
E-Business
Kaspersky Brings AI-driven Context to Cloud Workload Security

Kaspersky has updated its Cloud Workload Security (CWS) offering, introducing AI-powered workload analysis, enhanced integrations and performance optimisations designed to help organisations better secure complex cloud and hybrid environments.

The latest update brings integration with OpenAI API in the Kaspersky Container Security (KCS) part of the offering, also resulting in the creation of a new Advanced Pro license within the product.
The new capability provides contextual descriptions of detected vulnerabilities and potential risks, helping accelerate investigations, reduce knowledge gaps and support faster decision-making.
Designed for modern DevOps and hybrid cloud environments, Kaspersky CWS provides centralised visibility across workloads, Kubernetes clusters and cloud platforms, while supporting runtime protection, shift-left security practices and regulatory compliance requirements.
AI-driven visibility and improved workload protection
The update allows organisations to enrich container image scanning results with automated explanations and risk context generated by third-party large language models integrated via OpenAI API. By transforming technical scan data into actionable insights, the feature helps teams prioritise remediation and streamline security operations.
Additional improvements include single sign-on (SSO) integration and multi-domain Active Directory support, enabling more seamless deployment across distributed enterprise environments.
To optimise performance, Kaspersky CWS now also enhances image scanning efficiency by skipping oversized images when needed and avoiding rescans of identical images within a predefined timeframe. Expanded security policy capabilities and UX/UI updates further simplify workload protection and policy management.
Enhanced protection across cloud environments
The new release also updates Light Agent components, now leveraging the latest versions of Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Windows (version 12.12) and Kaspersky Endpoint Security for Linux (version 12.4) to improve overall security and integration capabilities.
“As AI adoption accelerates across industries, organisations are increasingly relying on containerised environments – placing additional pressure on security teams.
“To help ease this burden, we introduced AI integration within Kaspersky Cloud Workload Security that enables security professionals, including those just beginning their journey in container security, to make faster decisions and gain deeper insight into potential risks and vulnerabilities,” comments Anton Rusakov-Rudenko, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Cloud & Network Security at Kaspersky.
“Combined with performance optimisations and expanded integration capabilities, the solution helps organisations to protect cloud environments more efficiently while maintaining operational resilience.”
E-Business
SARS Denies Being Hacked by Nullsec Nigeria, Hacker Group

South African Revenue Service (SARS) has dismissed claims that its systems were breached, following allegations by a hacker group that it had compromised the tax authority’s digital infrastructure.

The controversy emerged after Nullsec Nigeria, a threat actor also known as Anonymous Nigeria, claimed to have breached both SARS and the State Information Technology Agency (SITA).
The hacktivist group allegedly posted links to download what it claimed was compromised data on the Breached hacker forum on Saturday, 23 May 2026, sparking concerns over a possible cyberattack targeting government systems.
However, SARS said it had conducted a thorough investigation into the claims and found no evidence that its systems had been compromised.
“SARS continuously monitors its systems for any suspicious activity and has conducted a thorough investigation in response to these reports. These claims are false and unsubstantiated,” the revenue service said in a statement.
“At this stage, there is no evidence that SARS’s systems have been compromised. SARS wishes to reassure the public regarding the integrity of its systems.”
The tax authority stressed that safeguarding taxpayer information remains one of its core responsibilities and forms part of its broader efforts to maintain public confidence in South Africa’s tax administration system.
SARS said the “protection of taxpayer information and the security of its digital platforms” is treated as “sacrosanct”.
The agency also urged South Africans to avoid sharing unverified claims and instead rely on official channels for accurate information.
“Members of the public are urged to verify information before sharing and not to circulate unverified claims or rely on information from unofficial sources,” SARS said.
At the same time, SARS warned taxpayers to remain vigilant against phishing scams and fraudulent messages falsely claiming to be from the tax authority.
For guidance on identifying scams and phishing attempts, SARS directed the public to its official online resource page: SARS scams and phishing guidance
SARS said it would continue monitoring its digital environment and communicate any developments through official platforms should the need arise.
E-Business
Pope Calls for ‘Disarming’ of AI, Warns of “New Forms of Slavery”

Pope Leo XIV called Monday for the “disarming” of artificial intelligence in his long-awaited manifesto on the rapidly developing technology, and warned of “new forms of slavery” behind its rise.

Leo, warned against “a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance”.
He presented his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas” (Magnificent Humanity) in person at the Vatican, alongside AI experts including Christopher Olah, co-founder of US giant Anthropic.
Anthropic is embroiled in a legal battle with the US military after opposing the use of its technology for lethal autonomous warfare and mass surveillance.
At the presentation, Olah said AI companies operate “inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing”.
He welcomed input from outside actors like the Catholic Church, to “push events in a better direction” saying that “the questions raised by AI are bigger than the AI research community”.
In the encyclical, Leo also sounded the alarm over AI-directed weaponry, saying it was “not permissible to entrust lethal” decisions to tech.
Leo has repeatedly clashed with the White House over the Iran war and its use of religion to justify conflict.
The “just war” theory — espoused recently by the Trump administration — was “outdated”, Leo wrote, adding that “no algorithm can make war morally acceptable”.
AI could be worth up to $4.8 trillion by 2033, a 25-fold increase in a decade, while concentrating its profits in the hands of a limited few, according to the United Nations.
“Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of ‘armed’ competition,” the pope wrote.
“To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity,” Leo wrote.
AI should be “human-friendly”, accessible to all, and open to discussion and debate, he added.
The head of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics has made the hot-button issue a cornerstone of his papacy by dedicating to it his first encyclical — a document that lays the basis for Church teaching and longer-term debate.
The manifesto references a range of cultural giants, from Greek philosopher Plato to Beethoven and his Ninth Symphony, even citing a character from JRR Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings”.
“Magnifica Humanitas” was signed on May 15, the 135th anniversary of an 1891 encyclical by Leo XIII, which laid the foundations of the Church’s social doctrine during the Industrial Revolution.
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