Africa Makes Biggest Gains in Bolstering Cybersecurity as Swiss, Canadians Lag

  • Cybersecurity breach now costs on average $4.5 million: report
  • Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda among nations in top group, ITU finds

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By Hugo Miller

September 12, 2024 at 21:33 GMT+7

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African nations have made the biggest gains in bolstering their cybersecurity defenses as the cost of breaches surged in recent years, according to the UN’s telecommunications agency.

The average least-developed country, or LDC, “has now reached the same level of cybersecurity status that many of the non-LDC developing countries had in 2021,” the Geneva-based International Telecommunications Union said in its 2024 report on the state of the world’s cybersecurity readiness released on Thursday. The number of nations with a national strategy for combating hackers jumped to 132 from 107 in 2021, the report found.

Data breaches have gotten more expensive and now cost a company on average roughly $4.5 million to address, according to the ITU. European Union regulators are cracking down on privacy breaches using the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation rules, and have fined companies more than $4 billion for violations of customers’ rights since the GDPR rules were introduced.

The study doesn’t include an overall global ranking but highlight the gains poorer African nations have made while discussing the vulnerabilities of some richer countries like Switzerland and Canada. It groups nations into five categories, with the top one called “role-modeling” and the lowest referred to as “building.”

While the top group is dominated by European countries and the US, it also includes GhanaKenya, Mauritius, Morocco and Rwanda. The second tier, known as “advancing” countries, includes ChinaRussia and Kazakhstan but also Switzerland and Canada.

Switzerland scored relatively well for its legal and technical measures but did much worse on the basis of “cooperation,” according to the ITU’s country-specific evaluation. Similarly, Canada scored well in four of five categories but got middling marks for “technical measures.”

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