In terms of cybercrime, the most targeted country in Africa is Namibia, the top malware in the continent is Jsecoin, impacting 19% of organisations, and 84% of malicious files in Africa were delivered via Web, compared to 63% of malicious files globally.

These are some of the statistics highlighted by Check Point in its latest Threat Intelligence Summary, which added that the most common vulnerability exploit type in Africa is Information Disclosure, impacting 68% of organisations.

The research highlighted several major attacks and data breaches across Africa, specifically Johannesburg City Power, which suffered serious disruptions after a ransomware attack in July prevented prepaid customers from buying electricity units and accessing City Power's official website, as well as Garmin which fell victim to a data breach after their South African shopping site was hosting a malicious software skimmer.

In an overview of the threat landscape, the company stated that while ransomware changed their approach and instead of being spread massively, started to perform tailored attacks against organisations.

Additionally, misconfiguration and poor management of the cloud resources remain the most prominent threats to the cloud ecosystem "with massive data theft being the most common attack employed against it."

According to Check Point research Namibia is the most targeted country in Africa, followed by Zambia, Morocco, South Africa and Nigeria.

The company added: "In 2019 we observed a considerable increase in email scams involving blackmailing such 'Sextortion' and 'Business Email Compromise' (BEC , which determined to convince victims to pay and don't necessarily contain malicious links or attachments. The email scammers have also increased the use of evasion techniques in order to bypass email security solutions."

Check Point added that over 35% of organisations were impacted by a mobile attack in 2019.

"Mobile Banking Trojans successfully infiltrated into the mobile arena with a sharp rise of more than 50% in comparison to 2018. Another method highly observed is the increasing utilisation of Sandbox Evasion Techniques including using transparent icon with empty application labels and monitoring devices' motion sensors," the company explained.

Software Supply Chain attacks have been prevalent in 2019, Check Point added.

"In this attack threat actor inserts malware into otherwise legitimate software, by modifying and infecting one of the building blocks this software relies upon. In this way attackers are capable of installing their malware on large distribution radius."

Check Point's regional director for Africa Pankaj Bhula told ITWeb Africa his company has observed several key trends including a lack of education in organisations, weak best practice implementations and a shortage of government regulations and processes.

"Africa is not unique to this global phenomenon and in fact, according to recent stats, the common vulnerability exploit type in Africa, which is Information Disclosure, impacts 68% of organisations. With the advent of mobility, cloud and digital transformation projects, the threat of exposure will increase significantly."