2025 unfolded as a year of accelerating cyberthreats, complexity, and high stakes across every industry. Organisations across Africa and beyond faced heightened cyber risk and operational disruption, with the task of protecting both people and data becoming increasingly challenging.
Data from INTERPOL shows that the most significant cyberthreats in Africa are online scams, ransomware, and business email compromise (BEC). The nature and scale of cyberthreats vary across different subregions due to differences in digital infrastructure, law enforcement capabilities, and cybercrime tactics.
For example, the emerging tech hub of Ethiopia became the world’s most targeted country for cyberattacks in 2024, while more advanced tech ecosystems, such as those in South Africa, have seen cybercriminals employing sophisticated AI and deepfake techniques over the past year.
The Gikko Zimbabwe Cybersecurity Forum 2025 emerged as a pivotal moment this year, providing a space where leaders could cut through the noise and gain clarity on real-world threats. The forum highlighted a core truth: cybersecurity and collaboration are inseparable pillars of digital resilience.
The Cybersecurity Forum 2025: Signals, Threats & Takeaways
The Gikko Zimbabwe Cybersecurity Forum 2025 brought security leaders together to get a clear view of the threats shaping the year ahead and to share practical ways to strengthen their organisations. Here’s a look at what we learned.
Cyber Extortion as the Dominant Enterprise Threat
According to Glenn Wilkinson, MSc (Oxford), 83% of enterprise cyber incidents in Africa are related to extortion. Furthermore, the forum emphasised that ransomware is no longer a technical disruption; it’s a business-critical crisis capable of halting operations overnight. Under-reporting is often a major driver of gaps in cybersecurity. Silent compromises, particularly in financial services and supply-chain-reliant industries, mean that the real incident volume is almost certainly higher than reported.
Industrialised Ransomware Operations
Glenn Wilkinson, MSc (Oxford), outlined how Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) and Initial Access Brokers (IABs) have lowered the technical barrier to entry. Syndicates now operate like commercial SaaS vendors: selling toolkits, support services, and access packages.
This industrialisation means attacks are faster, cheaper, and more coordinated. African organisations, deemed “high-value and lower-defence,” sit squarely in the crosshairs. Zimbabwe is exposed in this regard, as it is digitally advanced but under-secured.
Identity and Access Abuse Across Sectors
Across sectors, a worrying pattern has emerged: compromised credentials, weak MFA adoption, and vulnerable edge devices remain the easiest entry points for attackers.
For fintechs, banks, and rapidly scaling digital businesses, identity misuse is the bridge between a small compromise and a full extortion event.
The Biggest Threats Shaping 2025
These threats directly translate into downtime, legal exposure, reputational damage, and financial losses. The costs cited at the event ($4.4M globally per ransomware attack and $2.78M in South Africa) set the tone for the economic disruption that leaders must not only plan for but also seek to prevent.
Digital-first businesses and fintech are rapidly transforming. However, their velocity, cloud adoption, and interlinked ecosystems increase susceptibility to credential abuse and API-enabled compromise. Attackers go where operations cannot afford a pause. Fast-growth companies are prime targets and the preferred prey.
Lessons That Stood Out
Cyber readiness must replace reactive defence
In the event of an attack, survival depends on fast isolation and clean recovery, not expensive security stacks.
Planning, leadership engagement, and regular incident-response drills matter more than buying additional tools. Preparedness is the only advantage your organisation controls.
People remain both the first attack vector and the first line of defence
Empowered employees who are trained, informed, and included in security culture can prevent more breaches than any defensive product.
Partnerships, visibility, and shared intelligence outperform standalone tools
Given Africa’s still-to-be-nurtured cybersecurity talent pool and under-resourced IT teams, collaboration is now a capability multiplier.
Visibility tools that highlight weak access points, proven incident-response partners, and sector-wide intelligence sharing are more valuable than isolated, unintegrated solutions.
The message was clear: resilience is a collective effort, not a solitary investment.
A Retrospective on 2025’s Security Landscape
The Industry’s Turning Point
This year marked a shift toward integrated risk management (IRM), with tech, governance, and human behaviour converging. IRM is characterised by a holistic, technology-driven approach that combines traditional risk management with emerging threats such as cybersecurity, generative AI, and sustainability concerns.
For many industries in Africa, regulatory and compliance scrutiny has also significantly increased, prompted by evolving global standards, domestic reforms, and a trend toward more rigorous enforcement. This growing compliance scrutiny demands a proportional increase in security measures.
IRM directly addresses increased compliance scrutiny by providing a proactive and centralised approach to governance, risk, and compliance (GRC). This helps organisations meet regulatory obligations and demonstrate compliance to auditors and regulators.
The Rise of Business-Aligned Cybersecurity
The rise of business-aligned cybersecurity stems from a shift to viewing security as a strategic enabler of business goals rather than just a cost centre. Cybersecurity leaders are now expected to speak the language of revenue, resilience, and opportunity, clearly demonstrating the ROI of integrated risk management.
Key elements of business-aligned cybersecurity include:
- Prioritising security investments based on business outcomes.
- Using business-friendly metrics to track success.
- Creating a security-first culture throughout the organisation.
Security is no longer simply the domain of the IT department. It has become a core component of a successful organisation, embedded across strategy, customer trust, and digital transformation.
Key Cybersecurity Incidents in Africa
Here are five examples of major cyberattacks that have occurred in Africa in the past three years. These are just a few incidents that highlight the vulnerabilities of even the largest companies and agencies.
2023: BGFIBank Gabon & Kenya’s eCitizen Portal
BGFIBank Gabon was targeted by the Bianlian ransomware group. The attackers stole sensitive commercial data, seriously disrupting banking services and raising concerns about Central Africa’s data protection standards.
Kenya’s e-citizen portal was crippled by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which disrupted access to public services and affected government operations as well as citizens’ daily lives.
2024: NBS & Cell C
Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) was attacked and its website compromised.
South African mobile network operator Cell C suffered a data breach. The hackers exfiltrated approximately 2 terabytes of sensitive data from the company’s customer base of 7.7 million users. Portions of the data were leaked online, drawing public and regulatory attention.
2025: Pam Golding Properties
South African real estate firm Pam Golding Properties suffered a data breach that attracted national attention due to the sensitive nature of the client base, which includes prominent business leaders, international investors, and political figures. The stolen data included contact details, personal identifiers, property transaction histories, and other confidential business information, raising serious concerns around targeted fraud and real estate scams.
Factors Affecting Global Cyberthreat Trends
The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Cybersecurity Outlook report found that several compounding factors make the cybersecurity landscape more complex:
- Geopolitical tensions.
- Increased dependence on more complex supply chains.
- The rapid adoption of emerging technologies like AI.
- The complexity of increased regulatory requirements.
- The increasing sophistication of cybercrime.
- The widening cyberskills gap.
Why Communication Quality Became a Core Security Issue
Communication quality is a core security matter because any failure in the way information is transmitted, understood, and acted upon can directly lead to system vulnerabilities, security breaches, and operational disruptions. It underpins both the technical resilience of an organisation’s communication channels and the human factors involved in security management.
Security Thrives on Reliable, Compliant Communication Channels
Secure communication channels do more than prevent data breaches and theft. They also enable fast response, escalation, and evidence tracking, as well as accurate reporting.
With the right communication infrastructure, you can reduce the risk of human error, streamline the way your teams work together, and uphold governance requirements.
Why 2026 Demands a Better Foundation
Cyberthreats are currently scaling faster than human capacity. 36% of African businesses surveyed by the WEF reported a lack of confidence in their country’s ability to respond to major cyber incidents targeting critical infrastructure.
Moreover, the rise in AI-driven attacks demands AI-supported communication, clarity, and coordination. Communication platforms must be resilient, traceable, integrated, and overall, intelligent.
Enhance Your Business Communication: How Gikko Positions Organisations for Future-Ready Security
As cyber risks grow, organisations need communication systems they can rely on. Gikko helps teams move faster, coordinate better, and respond with confidence. Here’s how.
Strength in Signal Quality and Reliability
Gikko’s communication platform ensures clarity, speed, and accuracy — the core ingredients of any effective security posture. Built on leading cloud-based messaging software, our platform combines world-class technology with excellent customer service.
With cyberthreats evolving rapidly, the ability to communicate instantly and intelligently has become a major competitive advantage. Gikko gives you this advantage in a few key ways:
- An innovative self-service dashboard with actionable analytics, cost control, and campaign management.
- The portal lets you create communication flows and manage campaigns in one place.
- Pre-built integrations with popular tools, and a technical team to help you develop your own.
- Seamlessly integrate communication channels through a single API.
A Platform Built for High-Stakes Environments
Gikko’s secure, compliant communication platform isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. We tailor our communication strategies to your unique industry needs. Our platform is designed for sectors where precision matters, such as financial services, fintechs, insurance firms, healthcare, and enterprises.
Investing in Gikko reduces the risks of common insider threats, including fragmentation, shadow IT (the use of unauthorised software or hardware), and the use of unsecured channels.
Turning Insights Into Action
A powerful notion expressed by Glenn Wilkinson, MSc (Oxford), the keynote speaker at the Zimbabwe Cybersecurity Forum, was the need to reframe each organisation’s human resources as an asset and defence against attacks rather than a risk and vulnerability. A well-trained team, armed with intricate knowledge of how to spot cyberthreats, avoid falling prey, and follow predetermined protocol to limit damage when security has been compromised, ensures a robust cybersecurity posture.
These are some key goals for improved cybersecurity:
- Human error mitigation.
- Real-time collaboration.
- Governance discipline.
- Faster decision cycles.
These goals only become reality when your organisation’s communication infrastructure is strong:
- Consistent, standardised procedures = human error mitigation.
- Instant communication channels in a shared digital environment = real-time collaboration and knowledge-sharing.
- Improved accountability and responsiveness = Governance discipline.
- Real-time information flow, enhanced collaboration, and fewer misunderstandings = faster decision cycles.
Looking Ahead: Setting the Tone for 2026
The Convergence Continues
In the year to come, matters of cybersecurity will become more interlinked with communication and digital trust. The organisations that stay ahead of the curve in 2026 will be those that take security measures seriously and build integrated, intelligence-driven communication systems.
Resilience as a Strategic Advantage
Cyber resilience is an organisation’s ability to anticipate, recover from, and adapt to cyberthreats and attacks without disrupting business. This resilience provides a competitive edge by ensuring business continuity, improving customer trust, reducing financial losses, and enabling faster innovation than unprepared rivals.
Cyber resilience makes your organisation a reliable choice for partners, investors, and customers. It reframes security from a cost centre to a strategic asset.
We’re seeing a shift from “protection” to “preparation and response” as more organisations take a proactive approach to cybersecurity and work on building their resilience. This means learning, adapting, and communicating at speed.
Gikko’s Role in Shaping a Safer Digital Ecosystem
Gikko is committed to raising the standard of communication excellence by providing a multi-channel, data-driven platform that enables businesses to deliver personalised, real-time, and reliable messages to their customers. Our approach focuses on creating seamless, secure interactions that enrich the customer experience.
The Future Is Clear Where the Signal Is Strong
“Africa’s rising cyberthreats hit hard, undermining financial security for millions, yet they also open doors for progress. By rallying around shared goals — collaboration, skills, and awareness — the region can turn risks into momentum.”
— Kaspersky’s African Cyberthreat Landscape Report 2025
2025 proved the value of coordinated, trusted communication and collaboration in a world of rising complexity. With Gikko by your side, you can take your communication to the next level in 2026, securely and sustainably.
Talk to our security specialists to find out more.