Westcon-Comstor Sub-Saharan Africa has been appointed as a Check Point distributor for the Sub-Saharan Africa region, providing resellers with access to a range of fifth generation security management solutions and products.

Tidiane Lo, Westcon Director at Westcon-Comstor Sub-Saharan Africa, said, "The success of the future business is built on trust between business, customers, people and technology. However, the growing scourge of cyber-attacks and businesses inability to create a balance between the explosion of digital applications, devices and people, means this trust is fragile. As an industry we need to position and bring the most robust security solutions that cross the needs of both humans and technology to the fore."

"Check Point's industry leading catch rate of malware, ransomware, and other related cyber-attacks is perfectly positioned to help our resellers implement the defences needed to rebuild this trust."

According to Westcon Comstor, Check Point solutions, with their multi-level security architecture, provide enterprises with security that defends applications, data, and systems across various technologies including cloud and mobile.

"The Check Point CloudGuard SaaS, Public and Private IaaS solutions are revolutionising how business protect their assets in the cloud, using dynamic scalability, intelligent provisioning, and consistent control across physical and virtual networks. Through its integration into all the major hyperscalers, including AWS, Azure, Google, VMware, Oracle, and Alibaba Cloud, ensures advanced data and application protection in a multi-cloud deployment," reads a statement by Westcon Comstor.

Lo added: "Our position in the security industry and our experience working with leading vendors continues to highlight that no environment is immune to cyber-attacks. The reality is that threat actors continue to develop new tool sets and techniques which they use to target corporate assets in the cloud, on mobile devices, email platforms and more. The growth of digital applications and cloud usage in Africa is creating an array of opportunities for cyber criminals."

Pankaj Bhula, Regional Director for Africa at Check Point Software Technologies said: "Through the partnership with Westcon-Comstor, we have the opportunity to work together to help their customers better overcome modern cyber security threats, as well as jointly grow our coverage across the region."

Check Point's latest Global Threat Index for August 2019 warning organisations of a new variant of the Mirai IoT Botnet, Echobot, which has launched widespread attacks against a range of IoT devices.

First seen in May 2019, Echobot has exploited over 50 different vulnerabilities, causing a sharp rise in the 'Command Injection Over HTTP' vulnerability which has impacted 34% of organisations globally, the company explains.

Check Point's Global Threat Index ranks countries based on monthly data. According to the report, Nigeria has a risk ranking on 31, with Kenya not far behind at 35, followed by South Africa with a risk ranking of 56.

The Global Threat Index also provides the normalised risk index for each of the selected countries, with Nigeria's risk sitting at 65%, followed by Kenya at 64%, and South Africa with a normalised risk index of 52%.