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3T Solutions Consulting has announced the release of its 2017 cybersecurity research study for West Africa.

The report titled ‘2017 West Africa Cyber-Security Indexing & Readiness Assessment’ looks at the scope of cybersecurity, level of readiness and preparedness of four countries in West Africa namely Ghana, Nigeria, The Gambia and Liberia and their effort to combat cyber threats and intrusion into their economic, social and political structures.

The report is an aggregated index combining several indicators with a view of creating a standard comparison of the countries involved in the report.

“Cybersecurity is not an effort to be left to the individual countries alone. It should be thought of as a culture and a way of life. Partnerships have to be established among nations to counter the activities of nefarious cyber-attacks in order to create a world-wide culture of cybersecurity,” said Kojo Degraft, lead member of the research team.

"3T Solutions Consulting wants to improve awareness and help the region to continue to pay attention to the daily occurrences of cyber threats. From our study, we anticipate an increase in the threat level due to the lack of holistic approach towards cybersecurity, lack of functional emergency response teams within the region, the proliferation of smart phones and connected devices and new ways cybercriminals are bypassing existing security investments…" said Mr. Joel Amao, CTO.

The report examines:

The types of cybersecurity commitments by Ghana, Nigeria, The Gambia and Liberia.

Success on cybersecurity policy implementation.

The top cybersecurity threats in West Africa.

Emerging trends with direct impact on cybersecurity in West Africa.

The imminent types of vulnerabilities these countries are susceptible to and how it affects growth and development.

The key findings of the report include:

I. Technology alone cannot address the efforts to combat cyber-threats and attacks.

II. Risk management is a crucial component to addressing Cybersecurity without impacting the overall operations of organizations.

III. Although some industries, such as Banking and Finance have made some progress in addressing security on their infrastructure, our findings indicate most of the institutions are still very susceptible to client-side vulnerabilities.

IV. Most laws in the countries involved in the study lack meaningful implementation to deter cybercriminals.

V. Cybercriminals are using the path of least resistance, thus bypassing security investments that organizations have made in their infrastructure.

VI. Lack of functional public emergency response team poses serious economic and national security issue.