E-Business
HP Wolf Security Survey Reveals IT Leader Concern Over Firmware Attacks
HP Inc. has released research from HP Wolf Security showing changing workforce dynamics are creating new challenges for IT teams around firmware security. As business workforces become increasingly distributed, IT leaders say it’s harder than ever to defend against firmware attacks.
The shift to hybrid work models has transformed how organizations manage endpoint security, while also highlighting new challenges for IT teams around securing device firmware. The HP Wolf Security global survey of 1,100 IT leaders reveals that:
- The threat of firmware attacks is a growing concern for IT leaders now that hybrid workers are connecting from home networks more frequently: With hybrid or remote work now the norm for many employees there is a greater risk of working on potentially unsecure home networks meaning that the level of threat posed by firmware attacks has risen.
More than eight-in-ten (83%) IT leaders say firmware attacks against laptops and PCs now pose a significant threat, while 76% of ITDMs said firmware attacks against printers pose a significant threat.
- Managing firmware security is becoming harder and taking longer in the era of hybrid work, leaving organizations exposed: More than two-thirds (67%) of IT leaders say protecting against, detecting, and recovering from firmware attacks has become more difficult and time-consuming due to the increase in home working, with 64% saying the same of analyzing the security of firmware configuration.
As a result, 80% of IT leaders are worried about their capacity to respond to endpoint firmware attacks.
Dr. Ian Pratt, Global Head of Security for Personal Systems at HP Inc. comments: “Firmware attacks are very disruptive and much harder to detect or remediate than your typical malware – often requiring expert and even manual intervention to fix.
“This increases the cost and complexity of remediation considerably, particularly in hybrid environments where devices are not on site for IT teams to access.
“Having more endpoints sitting outside of the protection of the corporate network also reduces visibility and increases exposure to attacks coming in via unsecured networks.”
“At the same time, we are seeing a rise in destructive attacks – such as wiper malware. Last year, our research team saw attackers conducting reconnaissance on firmware configurations, with the likely intent of exploiting unsecured configurations to weaponize for financial gain.
“Once an attacker has gained control over the firmware configuration, they can exploit their position to gain persistence and hide from anti-malware solutions that live in the Operating System (OS).
“This gives them an advantage, allowing them to stealthily maintain persistence on target devices, so they can gain access to infrastructure across the enterprise and maximize their impact.”
Despite the clear risks that firmware attacks pose to organizations, device security is not always a major consideration in the hardware procurement process, with many organizations continuing to use technologies that are not built with security in mind.
This issue is being exacerbated by the new shadow IT whereby employees are purchasing and connecting devices outside of IT purview while working remotely. HP Wolf Security’s Out of Mind and Out of Sight report found that 68% of office workers that purchased devices to support remote work said security wasn’t a major consideration in their purchasing decision. Furthermore, 43% didn’t have their new laptop or PC checked or installed by IT or security.
Boris Balacheff, Chief Technologist for Security Research and Innovation at HP Labs comments: “Security must become part of the procurement process when purchasing new IT devices. Organizations need to play the long game, because the devices you procure today will be the environment you have to manage and protect tomorrow.
“State-of-the-art device security delivers protection for firmware against malware as well as physical tampering, with detection both below and above the OS and autonomous self-healing recovery from the hardware up – but this will only help address the issue for organizations that know to ask the right questions when they procure new devices.”
HP warns that one of the key issues that businesses face is that many organizations are still reliant on legacy devices that were built to older industry standards, where design for manageable security and resilience at scale was not a focus for hardware and firmware design. This is leaving a gap in enterprise security that could take years to close.
Balacheff concludes: “As attackers continue to invest in the capability to attack and disrupt PCs and other OT and IoT devices at the firmware level, organizations also need to learn how to monitor the state of the art in device security to keep updating procurement security requirements accordingly.
“This is what will enable leading organizations to stay ahead of emerging threats and protect, detect and remediate firmware attacks at scale in the era of hybrid work.”
Opay, a financial technology (fintech) firm, is working with Citigroup Inc., Deutsche Bank AG, and JPMorgan Chase & Co. for an initial public offering (IPO).
According to a report by Bloomberg on Friday, sources said the platform, backed by SoftBank Group Corp., is considering a listing in the United States and is targeting a valuation of about $4 billion.
They added that the company could proceed with the share sale later this year, although the timing and size of the offering are yet to be finalised.
Opay is one of Africa’s fastest-growing fintech firms, offering mobile payments, transfers, and other financial services across Nigeria.
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The fintech company, Citi, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan have not publicly commented on the IPO plans.
Like Opay, Flutterwave, a major fintech company in Africa is planning an IPO.
By Olumide Balogun
There was a time when using a search engine felt like cracking a code. You typed two or three carefully chosen keywords, hoped the machine understood, and waited to see what came back. People had to learn the language of machines, shrinking complex needs into stilted phrases.
Olumide Balogun, Director, West and East Africa at Google.
That era is ending. Today, a person can ask a question the same way they would ask a colleague, and the technology is finally learning to respond in kind. Nowhere is this shift more visible than in Nigeria, where a young, mobile-first population expects tools to keep pace with how they actually think and speak.
This change carries weight far beyond convenience. It is reshaping how Nigerian businesses reach customers and how customers find what they need.
For years, marketing online meant wrestling with rigid keyword lists. A small business owner had to guess every possible phrase a customer might type. If you sold ankara dresses, you tried “ankara dress,” “Nigerian print fabric,” “traditional wear Lagos,” and a dozen variations, hoping you covered the gaps. Anything you missed was a missed customer
The new wave of conversational search makes those lists feel ancient. People now ask layered, specific questions: “Where can I find a sustainable tailor in Yaba who makes office wear?” Older systems would have stumbled on a query like that. Newer ones, powered by artificial intelligence, can read intent and stitch ideas together. They connect a question to a relevant local website that a basic keyword search might never have surfaced.
The shift is starting to show up in concrete tools. Google’s AI Max for Search ads, now a year old, is one of the more visible examples. In plain terms, it lets a business describe what it sells and who it serves in everyday language, and the system figures out which searches to match it to, instead of forcing the owner to write hundreds of keywords by hand. Early adopters report stronger revenue growth than peers, and users say results feel more useful because the technology connects ideas for them, often surfacing local sites that would not have appeared before.
There is a quieter benefit too. When advertising becomes more relevant, it stops feeling like an interruption. An ad that answers a real question is no longer noise; it is information. That changes the texture of the internet. The marketplace gets less cluttered, and people spend less time wading through results that do not fit what they were looking for.
None of this is automatic. The technology only works if it can understand human nuance, and human nuance in Nigeria is not the same as human nuance in California. A search for “owambe outfit” or “small chops for fifty people” demands cultural context, not just linguistic translation. Newer features try to bridge that gap. AI Brief, a part of the same Google toolkit, lets a business owner type plain instructions, like “focus on sustainable traditional wear, keep a premium tone,” and the system follows them. This is steering by intent, not by keyword bingo.
There are gains for businesses with deep catalogues too. A retailer with thousands of items no longer has to match every question to the right page by hand. Tools such as Google’s Final URL Expansion read the search and send the customer straight to the page that fits, in real time. In travel, finance, and healthcare, where compliance matters, the same systems can carry mandatory legal text into every ad automatically. Regulated industries can grow without cutting corners.
These are not abstract wins. They are the difference between a small business being found by a customer in Abuja at 9 p.m. and being lost in a sea of generic results, between a hospital reaching the right patient and a tailor in Surulere being discovered by a bride planning her wedding.
We should not pretend the transition is finished. AI is imperfect. It can misread context, amplify mistakes, and require careful oversight. Regulators, businesses, and users all have a role in shaping how it develops in our market. The broader direction, however, is clear, and it is one Nigeria should engage with rather than resist.
Nigeria is a nation of storytellers and traders. Our markets, physical and digital, have always been about conversation. The technology of search is finally beginning to mirror that. It is becoming less of a vending machine and more of a market stall, where you can ask a question, get a real answer, and discover something you did not know you needed.
That is the bigger story behind any single product launch. It is about how a country full of voices is finding new ways to be heard. For Nigerian businesses willing to adapt, the opportunity has never been clearer.
According to Kaspersky telemetry, almost 19,500 malicious packages were found in open-source projects by the end of 2025, representing a 37% increase compared to the end of 2024.
Modern software development is inseparable from open-source components. However, open-source software may contain intentionally hidden threats which can leave the products that use malicious packages vulnerable to manipulation, including supply chain attacks. According to a new Kaspersky global study, supply chain attacks have emerged as the most common cyberthreat facing businesses over the past year.
Kaspersky reminds about high‑profile supply chain attacks that have emerged recently: In April 2026, the official website for CPU-Z and HWMonitor, free tools used by hardware enthusiasts, IT administrators and system builders worldwide to monitor hardware performance was compromised, silently replacing legitimate software downloads with malware-laced installers.
Analysis from Kaspersky GReAT showed that the compromise window was approximately 19 hours. Kaspersky telemetry detected that more than 150 victims across multiple countries faced this attack. The majority were individual users, which is consistent with the consumer-facing nature of the compromised software. Affected organisations spanned retail, manufacturing, consulting, telecommunications and agriculture.
- In March 2026, Axios, one of the most widely used JavaScript HTTP clients, was compromised. The attackers hijacked a maintainer’s account and published poisoned versions of the package (1.14.1 and 0.30.4). The malicious releases contained no harmful code in Axios itself but introduced a phantom dependency that deployed a cross-platform RAT, contacted a C&C server, and then erased traces of itself for macOS, Windows and Linux. Both versions were removed within hours, and the dependency was quickly put under a security hold. Kaspersky GReAT confirmed that the attack was not standalone – it shared tactics, techniques and procedures with Bluenoroff’s GhostCall and GhostHire campaigns, presented at the Security Analyst Summit in 2025.
- In February 2026, the developers of Notepad++, a widely used open-source text and code editor, disclosed that their infrastructure had been compromised due to a hosting provider incident. Kaspersky GReAT researchers discovered that attackers behind the Notepad++ supply chain compromise had used at least three distinct infection chains and targeted a government organisation in the Philippines, a financial institution in El Salvador, an IT service provider in Vietnam and individuals across several countries.
“According to our survey, 31% of enterprise businesses have been impacted by a supply chain attack in the past 12 months. Nevertheless, the security level of open‑source projects is not necessarily lower than that of proprietary-vendor solutions. In some cases, an active open‑source community can quickly discover and remediate vulnerabilities, whereas proprietary systems often rely on internal teams for audits.
The open‑source community strives to monitor emerging risks, cybersecurity specialists conduct researches to find vulnerabilities and malicious code in open‑source software, promptly notifying their users and the community. Completely eliminating the potential risks is impossible, but they can be minimised also with the help of security solutions and automated code‑analysis tools,” comments Dmitry Galov, Head of Kaspersky GReAT Russia and CIS.
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