South African businesses, particularly those in the corporate sector, are each facing more than 1,800 cyberattacks per week, according to Check Point Software Technologies.
While AI continues to be the biggest trend in technology, cybersecurity has fast become an area receiving increasing attention and investment from companies as the stakes of operating in the digital economy become higher.
Businesses understand they stand to lose millions of rand and reputational damage if breaches are not contained or minimised.
Check Point’s Global Threat Intelligence insights for November show that organisations around the world each faced an average of 2,003 cyberattacks per week. This is a 3% increase from October and a 4% rise year on year, “reflecting a continued escalation in global cyber threats driven by ransomware expansion and risks linked to Generative AI.”
African countries appear to be faring somewhat better, as overall attacks declined 13% year on year.
In its study, Check Point included four African countries. Of these, Angola had the worst statistics, dealing with 4,251 attacks per organisation per week, followed by Nigeria at 3,374 and Kenya at 2,384.
South Africa saw 1,863 attacks per organisation per week.
Sectors hardest hit were government, financial services and consumer goods and services.
South Africa experienced a number of high-profile attacks this year, including an invasion of SAA’s website, mobile application and certain internal communication systems.
Somewhat ironically, many corporates are still figuring out their use of AI, while scammers and criminals have found the technology an effective way to increase the breadth, sophistication and speed of their attacks.
With enterprise use of generative AI tools expanding rapidly, Check Point said this has actually increased exposure to sensitive data.
One in 35 generative AI prompts submitted from enterprise networks in November “posed a high risk of data leakage”, affecting 87% of organisations that use such tools regularly and “underscoring how deeply AI has become embedded in daily workflows”.
In addition, the Nasdaq-listed technology firm noted that organisations average 11 different generative AI tools per month, “most of which are likely unsupervised and operating outside formal security governance”.
“Such misuse increases the likelihood of accidental data exposure, leading organisations to a higher risk of malicious infiltration, ransomware and AI-powered cyberattacks,” said the company.
Omer Dembinsky, data research manager at Check Point Research, said: “November’s data shows that along with the overall number of attacks continuing to rise, we see additional concern in the increasing sophistication behind these operations. The combination of ransomware growth and GenAI-related data exposure provides attackers with more tools and opportunities to execute damaging campaigns.
“The only effective approach is prevention-first, powered by real-time AI and proactive threat intelligence to block attacks before they cause harm.”
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