Think before you click

5 min readDec 13, 2019

Inquiries Answered, Feed Your Curiosity. Africa and Ethiopia on the scale.

No matter what you do nowadays, it is a must that an online interaction must occur. The status in Africa in general and Ethiopia in specific is no different. More to say, Africa is the world’s most vulnerable continent to Cyber Attacks due to countless reasons such as infrastructure and awareness.

In today’s article, we will dive deeper into the whole fuss created and how you can be outreached, for a while!

Online, the new frontline

We shop online. We work online. We play online. We live online. More and more, our lives depend on online, digital services. Almost everything can be done online — from shopping and banking to socializing and card making — and all of this makes the internet, also known as cyberspace, an attractive target for criminals.

Large-scale cybersecurity breaches often make the headlines but about 70% of organizations are keeping their worst security incidents under wraps, so what makes the news is just a small proportion of the breaches that are actually taking place. For instance, the UK is being targeted by up to 1,000 cyber attacks every hour.

The knowledge, tools and best practices relating to protecting the computers, communications networks, programs and data that make our digital lives possible are collectively referred to as cybersecurity or information security.

Last week in Ethiopia, there has been an unsuccessful attempt to breach key financial institutions that went foiled and that caused a shut of the Internet in the country for about half an hour. With that in mind, it vividly restates the fact that Ethiopia been facing attempts of cyber-attacks in enormous, indirect ways, as of 2018/2019 witnessed more than 488 cyber attacks “attempts”.

Thus, this brings a very interesting quest that how can Ethiopia face such a disastrous mean of attacks in a way that takes less harm than it is imposed, while 2020 is when cybersecurity gets even weirder.

If you thought cybersecurity was a challenging and often weird part of the tech industry, be prepared for it to get even odder.

The next couple of years will bring a new range of threats that will take tech security far beyond its traditional boundaries and will require a whole new set of skills and alliances.

One example: tech analyst Forrester predicts that deep fakes could end up costing businesses a lot of money next year: as much as $250m.

With the convergence and evolution of Technology that Africa is beholding, what can we do to keep ourselves, companies and businesses out of reach to deadly threats?

As seen, there’s no obvious answer that, since if you secured yourself in one way, other loopholes are being opened up and breached into.

Later on this article, we will come to some basic stuff you can do to make yourself, “COVERED”.

We cannot always rely on governments as there are “bigger” power manipulators, like Facebook, who have not only our data, but in a somehow extreme sense, our LIVES, since everything around us is being revolved around the use of Technology, and that every country is trying to achieve that!

More investors, more money, more threats, more hackers, more budget.

With that said, Africa is being expected to be the next big growth market because mainly it is home for some of the youngest populations in the world; statistics cannot lie!

That means that the best way to really create wealth in the world is through technology-based and knowledge-based industries.
- Getahun Mekuria, Ethiopia’s minister of innovation and technology, talking about the services that account for 65% of global GDP that incorporated tech

In the case of Ethiopia, with only one single, state-owned telecommunications company is protected from the competition -for the time being, expectations of digital transformation are way too high!

Movements have been made to make discernible actions:

Industrial parks
Tech in Education
Venture Capitalism
Digital Transformation
and more

So how to stay safe on the Internet in an unsafe environment like the Internet?

Immediate actions and changes must be made by us and those who whether or not rely on frequent online interactions, because one small wrong step, and then you are LITERALLY gone.

There are a number of things you can do to stay safe on the internet. Like almost all parts of life, although you hear terrible stories, most people never have serious problems online. By taking a few simple steps, you can make yourself much more secure.

Stay up to date
Do the basics: The basic checklist:
Set up a personal firewall
Install an antivirus program
Get used to making backups
Set up your computer to require passwords to log in and when unlocking the screen
Use hard disk encryption if you have it — especially on laptops. It will take a couple of hours to perform these steps, but your computer will be significantly more secure.
Fix your email
Place more budget on cybersecurity engineers who do have the capability of minimizing the damages, let alone turn them down.

A worker once left her ID
Unattended, where all could see.
It disappeared that day.
And we’re sorry to say
So did the company’s IP. (IP = intellectual property)

Everyone and anyone are always at the risk of being tricked, hacked, or exploited by the wrong guys. Yes, having basic cyber-security options will help if you are an individual or a small startup, but as you grow as a company, population, nation, and continent, then we need to take some serious, “bigfoot” steps to show that we are really not an easy target.

And remember, Don’t let your trash become someone else’s treasure

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Think before you click

Online, the new frontline

So how to stay safe on the Internet in an unsafe environment like the Internet?

Written by Nabil Mohammed