Egypt at the Forefront of African Cybersecurity

Egypt at the Forefront of African Cybersecurity

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The Egyptian government has recently launched a new cybersecurity division in order to defend its institutions from cyber attacks. When one understands the scope of growth and evolution in Egyptian mobile networks, the fear from cyber attacks is more than understandable, especially when considering the fact that the Middle East has been a major cyber-attack target, oil and gas companies specifically. Daily News Egypt cites Harish Chib, vice president for Sophos (an international company specialising in security software and hardware), saying that the launch of the new division was a smart move, especially when considering the fact that Egypt has become an empire in terms of malicious IP addresses throughout the African continent.

Chib added that further growth in this Egyptian market is the popular estimation, thus a more serious approach to IT and network security in an attempt to create a safe and fruitful ICT environment is reasonable. In order for these hopes and estimations to come to life, the government has set a few targets for the country in this field, including improvement of quality as well as readiness of cybersecurity.   The aforementioned growth and development faced with the constant fear of cyber-attacks have lead a trend of investing high amounts of resources in IT security. Another method of cyber-defense has been involving key sectors in the effort to achieve cyber-security. More operatively speaking, continues Chib, there has been a shift from signiture based protection to more advanced capabilities that help with faster threat discovery, improved quality and accuracy of detection, reduced false positives, and are easier to deploy.

We can observe and use Sophos’ inspirations in the Egyptian market to try and foresee the evolution in their cyber-security; Chib added that among other products and services the company intends to launch a next-generation signiture-less malware detection solution (named Sophos Clean) and Sophos Email Appliance with next-generation sandboxing technology to help Egyptian customers reduce the risk of phishing, targeted scams, and sophisticated threats.