‘How business organisations can tackle rising cyberthreats’

In a bid to combat rising cyber threats, new techniques to tackle the menace have been suggested to business organisations.

According to Modern Workplace and Security Business Group Lead for Microsoft Middle East and Africa Emerging Markets, Mohamed El Nemr, with weak passwords, password spraying, and phishing the entry point for most attacks, identity is the new battleground of cyberthreats.

El Nemr noted that: “There can be little doubt, cybercriminals have our passwords in their sights. This is particularly the case in Africa where businesses are often more prone to cyberattacks than companies anywhere else in the world. According to one report, Nigeria ranked third in Africa, experiencing 16.7 million cyberattacks. South Africa ranked first with 32 million attacks, followed by Kenya at 28.3 million.

“For organisations looking to protect themselves, preventing an identity from being misused or stolen, is now the highest priority. As part of the first edition of, Cyber Signals, Microsoft’s new quarterly cyberthreat intelligence brief, we take a closer look at the dangers of the rising mismatch in the scale of identity-focused attacks in relation to levels of organisational preparedness.

“The brief, which offers an expert perspective into the current threat landscape, aims to be a valuable resource to Chief Information Security Officers in Nigeria, as they navigate the constantly changing threat landscape. Cyber Signals aggregates insights we see from our research and security teams on the frontlines, including analysis from our 24 trillion security signals combined with intelligence we track by monitoring more than 40 nation-state groups and 140 threat groups.”

El Nemr, therefore, told business organisations to prevent passwords from falling into the wrong hands adding that: “Enabling multifactor authentication (MFA) is an important weapon in fighting back. By so doing, your organisation mitigates the risk of passwords falling into the wrong hands. You can take this a step further by eliminating passwords altogether and, at the same time, eliminating administrative privileges through passwordless MFA.

“Another fundamental aspect of your security hygiene should be to thoroughly review all tenant administrator users or accounts tied to delegated administrative privileges. This will help your organisation verify the authenticity of users and activities. Your security team should then disable or remove any unused delegated administrative privileges.

“Attackers are constantly raising the bar. But leading with identity-focused solutions, including enforcing MFA, adopting passwordless solutions, and creating conditional access policies for all users dramatically improves protection for your devices and data. If identity is the new battleground, then zero trust is the must-have weapon for fighting back.

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