CYBER CRIMINALS DEPRIVE TANZANIA OFF TSH10 BILLION

Arusha — TANZANIA is reported to have so far lost nearly 10 billion/- through cyber related fraud crimes, involving mostly card skimming and ATM pumping electronic thefts.

That was among the observations in the first day of the ongoing "Cyber Defence East Africa 2014" meeting that opened and scheduled to end next Friday, with the aim to address the growing threats of face-less criminals hiding behind computer screens and causing more damage than the physically guntoting bandits.

But, while officially opening the meeting here, the Deputy Minister for Home Affairs, Mr Pereira Silima, revealed that there were more than 300 cyber-crime cases, being investigated in Tanzania, some of which are about to be benched in courts of law, but limited resources, lack of the required technical know-how, coupled with digital illiteracy, among the local police and other law enforcers, made efforts to curb online piracy suffer setbacks.

"Cyber criminals being tech savvy individuals are always miles ahead in digital prowess compared to people who try to track or pursue them; they can also transcend territorial borders, hacking computers and stealing data millions of miles away while remaining anonymous," pointed out the Deputy Minister.

Mr Benard Badi of the Central Bank of Tanzania (BOT) revealed that the 2014 cyber security index from IBM Security Services shows that 23.8 per cent of cyber security incidents are targeted at finance and insurance industry.

Dr Vilius Benetis a senior consultant, focusing on cyber security infrastructure audit and architecture optimisation from the Norway Registers Development East Africa limited (NRD EA) said Tanzania, being the leading country as far as electronic money transfer through mobile phone is concerned, was also very susceptible to cyber-crime and fraud; "Also, the victims of such electronic thefts or online crimes, do not know where to report or seek help and many tend to suffer in silence," he said.

Dr Benetis pointed out that cyber security landscape keeps changing with threats, actors, technologies and methods used as well as attacking paradigm constantly shifting.

Worldwide, more than US $445 billion gets lost annually through series of cyber-crime, electronic theft, and online piracy, including infringing intellectual property rights with more than 800 million data records getting hacked into or stolen.

Daily News