KnowBe4 warns Africa about phishing, social engineering

A new report is forewarning Africa of phishing attacks and social engineering scams, saying one in three corporate employees on the continent is vulnerable to the crimes.

This is according to KnowBe4’s 2023 Phishing by Industry Benchmarking Report for Africa, which measures organisations’ “phish-prone percentage” (PPP).

Phish-prone percentage indicates the number of employees in an organisation that are likely to fall for phishing or a social engineering scam.

KnowBe4’s report is based on data from over 12.5 million users across 35,681 organisations in 19 industries.

The results of over 32.1 million simulated phishing security tests are included.

This year’s report details international phishing benchmarks from North America, the United Kingdom and Ireland, Europe, Africa, South America, Asia, Australia and New Zealand.

In Africa, 412 organisations from South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria and Botswana participated in the phishing simulation tests, with a total of 337,937 emails sent.

The majority of these organisations (58 percent) were small (one to 249 employees), followed by medium (26 percent, 250-999 employees) and large ones (16 percent, 1000+ employees).

KnowBe4, a security awareness training firm, says African business users had a lower baseline PPP than many other regions. This means they were less likely to fall for phishing attacks before training.

However, their improvement after 90 days of training was also lower than in other regions.

After a year of ongoing training, African users achieved a 79.8 percent improvement in their PPP, showing the effectiveness of consistent security awareness education, the company said.

Anna Collard, Senior Vice President of Content Strategy and evangelist for KnowBe4 Africa, said, “The report underscores the fact that while technology plays an important role in preventing and recovering from an attack, organisations cannot afford to ignore the human factor..”

The root cause of most data breaches can be traced to the human factor.”

The report shows that without security training 33.2 percent of employees across all regions and industries are likely to fall for phishing attacks or fraudulent requests.

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