Cybercrime has become a national crisis, South African Centre for Information Security CEO Beza Belayneh said at a recent function hosted on the issue, equating the scale of the threat to that of South Africa’s HIV/Aids pandemic. He said that South Africa had ranked the third-most “fished” country in the world, and was open to attack in a well-connected society.

“Cybercrime is no longer a criminality – it is a national crisis,” he told attendees to an event hosted jointly by Neotel and the Mail & Guardian, and urged Cabinet Ministers, bankers and consultants to team up to deal with the scourge.

“Governments are hacked, police websites are hacked, banks are losing millions – the statistics are that South Africa loses R1-billion a year, and it now threatens human life,” he said.

The International Telecommu- nications Unions attributed losses of about $100-billion a year worldwide to cybercrime.

Data Breach

Everyone was affected and the data breach was growing, he said, citing reports over the past several months of hackers increasingly gaining access to private company and government websites, the most notable being the South African Police Service (SAPS) website last month.

The SAPS had commented that the information published by international “hacktivist” group, Anonymous, in response to the massacre of 34 protesting miners at Marikana, was already in the public domain and that no important case information had been compromised.

Anonymous had revealed the names and details of the whistle-blowers.

State Security Minister Siyabonga Cwele affirmed that the nation, along with the rest of the world, was “vulnerable” to cybercrime, and that government was progressing a cybercrime policy aimed at mitigating the challenge.

The high incidence of cybercrime in both the private and public sectors, particularly within a relatively small economy, was worrisome, and required a comprehensive framework.

“As a nation, we currently have an uncoordinated response [to cyberthreats],” he said.

The much-delayed Cybersecurity Policy would be published by August for public comment.

Cabinet approved the proposed framework last year to combat cyberwarfare and cybercrime, deal with national security threats in cyberspace and develop, review and update existing substantive and procedural laws to ensure alignment.

A National Cybersecurity Committee would oversee the implementation of the policy, while the Department of State Security would accelerate an “awareness” drive.

The aim was to create widespread awareness of cybercrime to ensure citizens and public servants were enabled to respond to threats quickly and report the crime, and to enable government and private sector to assess the scale of the attacks and formulate appropriate prevention plans.

“A challenge . . . is that people [from State departments or companies] keep quiet and count their costs. They need to be vocal and report the incidents . . . so we can try to find ways of preventing [further breaches] and alert other countries [of the threat],” Cwele added.

He commented that a Cyber- security Hub would be established within the Department of Commu- nications in the near term to pool public- and private-sector threat information and process and disseminate information to relevant stakeholders in the industry and civil society.