By Cyber Era Reporter

With an aim to develop counterintelligence to tackle the increasing number of cybercrimes in Africa, Tradepass hosted more than 1500 cyber enthusiasts virtually at the 3rd edition of CyFrica.

With global pandemic impacting around the world, Africa experienced a surge in the remote working (work-from-home) figures with an increased usage of insecure remote/home servers, making the region more vulnerable to cybercrimes. CyFrica 2021: LIVE laid out the best practices required for public and private enterprises to understand the threats surrounding the digital landscape and the necessary measures to mitigate the whole issue.

“From time to time, there is a need for risk assessment to evaluate the risk of this new normal which is working remotely”, said Dr. Mohammed Onimisi Yahaya, Assistant Director, National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) at the recent virtual conference CyFrica 2021: LIVE, commenced on 4-5 May 2021.

Kaspersky’s Head of Research Center META, Dr. Mohamad Amin Hasbini, while sharing his insight on the current pandemic period mentioned, “The attackers will continue to exploit the pandemic without any shame or restriction as they have not even spared the medical research centers that are working on developing the vaccine”.

Dell Technologies – DPS Division’s Manager of Systems Engineering, Ravi Baldev said, “If you want to protect your digital transformation journeys, you got to have the right mechanisms”, while enlightening all the participants on data protection.

Talking about cyber resilient strategies for businesses, Enrico Salvatori, Business Consultant – Security at Micro Focus stated, “A resilient organization is one that understands how to anticipate threats, withstand problems, recover from breaches and evolve to the next version of itself”.

The virtual summit covered a variety of topics like ‘Securing the future of work with Cyber AI’, ‘Diplomacy in Cyberspace’, ‘Africa’s Cyber Security Culture’ and many others. The summit also threw light on the emerging, new-age technologies and discussed the vulnerabilities faced by the 5G networks in Africa. Moreover, it left no stone unturned while giving an analysis about cybercrimes and security, every piece of industry intelligence related to Cloud Management, Malwares, Ransomware, Implementing the Zero Trust framework, Banking Trojans, Security Breaches, AI for cyber security, etc.

Here’s a glimpse of the speaker line-up:

•             Assistant Director, National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Dr. Mohammed Onimisi Yahaya.

•             Head of Reasearch Center META, Kaspersky, Dr. Mohamad Amin Hasbini.

•             Director Solutions Engineering IMEA, BeyondTrust, Michael Byrnes.

• Head, Computer Emergency Response Team of Mauritius (CERT-MU) Dr. Kaleem Ahmed Usmani

•             SVP Content Strategy and Evangelist, KnowBe4 Africa, Anna Collard.

•             Director of Technology, Darktrace, Andrew Tsonchev

•             CISO, FirstBank Nigeria, Harrison Nnaji.

•             Head of Security Engineering – Africa, Check Point Software Technologies, Issam El Haddioui.

•             CTO, Tripwire, Dave Meltzer

•             Group Head – Information Security and Network Operations, Dangote Group, Oriyomi Fowler

•             CISO, NPF Microfinance Bank, Philip Aiwekhoe

•             Information Security Officer, United Nations, Collins Oduor

•             Enterprise Cyber Security Advisor, Kaspersky, Lehan van den Heever

•             CISO, World Health Organization, Flavio Aggio

•             Consulting Engineer, Fortinet, Shiraz Valji

•             VP of Solutions, Securonix, Augusto Barros

•             Group CIO, Dangote Group, Prasanna Kumar Burri,

•             Systems Engineering, Dell Technologies – DPS Division, Ravi Baldev

•             Security Advocate, SentinelOne, Thom Langford

•             Chief Evangelist, ManageEngine, A Karthik

•             Principal Cyber Security Assurance Officer, Safaricom, Joylynn Kirui

•             CRO, Musoni Microfinance, Faheem Ali

•             CISO, Unity Bank, Daniel Adaramola

•             CISO, GT Bank, Bharat Soni

•             Director, Group IT-GRC & Strategy, IHS Towers, Fene Osakwe

The sponsors included: Kaspersky, Check Point Software, Fortinet, Securonix, KnowBe4, BeyondTrust, Darktrace, Tripwire, Micro Focus, Dell Technologies, SentinelOne, ManageEngine, Redington Value and Acronis.

Cyber Era NG was the trusted Media Partner for the event.