National responses to cyber security infringements may have a long way to go in Africa, says an expert speaking at ITWeb's Security Summit 2014 in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Charl van der Walt, co-founder and managing director of IT security firm SensePost, illustrated how websites belonging to three African countries' Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) websites are offline.

SensePost's van der Walt illustrated how Internationalcybercenter.org lists the African CERT websites of Kenya, Mauritius, South Africa and Tunisia.

But only Mauritius has an active CERT website presence while the Tunisian website displays the following message: "attempt to attack detected and blocked."

Meanwhile, the South African Computer Security Incident Response Team website is completely offline, while the Kenyan National Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT-KENYA) has a message, at the time of writing, which says "this site is temporarily unavailable."

"It's very apparent to me that at least in the near future we're not going to get the kind of response we need: at least in Africa," said van der Walt.

Africa; though, does have a continent wide CERT website in the form of Africacert.org.

Africacert.org describes itself as an "African forum of computer incident response teams who cooperatively handles computer security incidents and promotes incident prevention programs."

Countries listed on the website include Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Morocco, South Africa, Sudan, Tunisia.