With the advent of digitisation, where most government and private sector services have gone online, people work from home and the wider use of social media, the cyber threat landscape has only grown wider.
This has led to complicated cyber-attacks that target financial systems, key physical infrastructure, government services, individual social media accounts, and so on. They range from State-backed transnational attacks and organised crime groups taking over social media accounts. These include the recently reported attack on Kenya's e-citizen system, which supports the provision of key government services.
Cyber-attacks usually interfere with the normal operations of digital systems, compromising their confidentiality, integrity, and availability. They include distributed denial-of-services that involve sending a large amount of traffic to a service or system, causing overloading of its memory and processing resources and rendering it non-responsive. Others are identity theft and scamming, private data loss where sensitive personal information or intellectual property is targeted followed by demand for a ransom or threat to sell and expose them for a ransom or threat to sell and expose them for financial gain. Such attacks lead to a loss of confidence in digital services and also enable cyberbullying.
