Both Africa and the Middle East lead their economic peers in cybersecurity, but the regions fall short of claiming strong scores for overall cyber resilience.
According to data published by SecurityScorecard on Jan. 15 at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, the Middle East scored a low 'B', but fares better than both the economically similar East Asian and Southern European regions in terms of cybersecurity.
With a solid 'C' ranking, surpassed its peers in the Central Asian and Caucasian region and South Asia, the company stated.
Both regions need to invest in replacing outdated technology and end-of-life systems, and create stronger workflows for identifying threats and patching systems, says Ryan Sherstobitoff, senior vice president at SecurityScorecard.
Taking Cyber Steps Forward Cybersecurity has become an increasing priority for organizations in both the Middle East and Africa.
Companies in the Middle East, for example, are increasingly adopting cloud services, leaving their security teams with the job of ensuring that digital transformation does not undermine security.
Organizations in Africa are struggling to build more local and regional cybersecurity expertise, with efforts such as building a Virtual Cyber Hub in Nigeria and bolstering cross-border threat intelligence rolling out as major project targeting the shortfall.
Overall, the Middle East and Africa have a total cybersecurity workforce of about 402,000 people, but needs another 102,000 cybersecurity professionals, according to the ISC2 Cybersecurity Workforce Study 2023.
The region needs to address the massive talent gap by training as many as four million workers and make cybersecurity solutions more affordable, says Margaret Olele, CEO of the American Business Council in Nigeria.
Stronger Economies Have Better Cybersecurity The regional cybersecurity indices were created by using the scores for every organization collected by SecurityScorecard in 189 countries across 17 regions worldwide, but the researchers randomly selected half of the organizations tracked in the United States.
The scores for the organizations were aggregated for each region to determine an overall regional score, which was then compared to gross domestic product per capita for the district, SecurityScorecard stated in its Cyber Resilience Scorecard report.
Africa and the Middle East score better than their GDP-per-capita peers, but still lag in cybersecurity.
The correlation between the strength of the regional economy and cyber readiness is not surprising, as economies that tend to have more capital invest more in cybersecurity and innovation, Sherstobitoff says.
African nations regularly face a variety of attacks, including distributed denial-of-service campaigns and, increasingly, ransomware, according to a July 2023 report by Positive Technologies.
More Capital Needed for Better Cybersecurity The SecurityScorecard report found that the regions with the strongest overall cyber-resilience scores included Northern, Western and Central Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and North America.
The Middle East joined those regions in scoring overall 'B' rankings.
The main factors that hurt cyber resilience included lacking endpoint security, a slow patching cadence, and factors such as network security issues, domain reputation, and the pervasiveness of ransomware.
Many of the regions with lower GDP-per-capita rankings also have to deal with out-of-date and unpatched - or even, unpatchable - equipment, says SecurityScorecard's Sherstobitoff.
Interestingly, cyberattacks tend to come from geographic regions that neither have large nor small GDP-per-capita rankings.
The top-4 originators of cyberattacks - China, the Russia Federation, Turkey, and Japan - are the immediate source for 58% of attacks, according to the SecurityScorecard report.
This Cyber News was published on www.darkreading.com. Publication date: Tue, 16 Jan 2024 18:10:05 +0000