The growth of Angola's lucrative economic sectors is turning out to be a blessing in disguise for the Southern African country, as it has become one of the most enticing targets for cyber criminals on the continent.
This is according to an industry expert, who commented following Check Point Technologies released its Global Threat Intelligence Report for August 2025.
Africa is the most heavily attacked region, with Angola suffering the most attacks (3,648 per organisation each week), followed by Kenya (3,448), Nigeria (3,394), and South Africa (2,148).
In an interview, Rudi van Rooyen, security engineer and evangelist at Check Point Technologies, explained why Angola was the most targeted.
Angola is the second-largest oil producer in Sub-Saharan Africa (after Nigeria).
He said: "Angola is targeted because it has money-rich sectors (oil, banking and telecoms), weak cyber defenses and limited awareness and enforcement capacity."
Van Rooyen made some recommendations for companies in Angola and the rest of the African continent to shield themselves from attacks.
According to the Check Point Research report, regionally, Africa reported the highest average volume of cyber attacks, at 3 239 weekly per organisation in August.
It is followed by Asia-Pacific (2 877 weekly), Latin America (2 865 weekly), Europe (1 685 weekly incidents) and North America (1 480 weekly attacks) as ransomware fueled the surge globally.
According to Van Rooyen, adopting a prevention-first approach, securing critical infrastructure and essential services, strengthening national and organisational cyber resilience, closing the cyber security skills gap, fostering public-private sector partnerships, and promoting regional cooperation must be prioritised when combating cyber- attacks.
He stated that Africa must prioritise oil and gas, banking, telecommunications, and government services as high-value targets to safeguard, such as deploying real-time threat information to protect against global attack operations that frequently spill into Africa.
Van Rooyen went on to say African countries must also use continental frameworks, such as the African Union's Malabo Convention, and regional blocs to coordinate cyber security.
"(Africa must) align with global best practices but also adopt localised strategies for Africa-specific threats such as mobile money fraud, phishing and ransomware," van Rooyen said.
Share