When the internet became available to the average person in the late 1990s, only a relative privileged few on the African continent enjoyed connectivity. Today, though, with over 60% of North Africa having permanent access to the web–eclipsing even the global average of 51%–criminal activity has accompanied this technological development on a scale that no reasonable person would have thought possible a quarter century ago.
Unfortunately, Morocco’s vulnerability to this activity is no exception to the rule.
Africa is seeing a huge surge in the digital technology sector, especially in e-commerce and financial technology. Exacerbating exposure and increasing vulnerability to internet security breaches was the Covid global debacle of mismanagement, which made telecommuting a necessary alternative to office work, and which therefore often decreased accessibility of what would have been on-site IT support upon the onset of “computer emergencies” to troubleshoot these problems.
Interpol recently published its 2023 “African Cyberthreat Assessment Report: Outlook by the African Cybercrime Operations Desk” report, and the implications were not pretty for Morocco, relative to the rest of the continent.
Highlighted in the report were accounts of activity in the following areas: Business Email Compromise; Phishing; Ransomware Attacks; Banking Trojans and Stealers; Online Scams; Cyber Extortion; and Crimeware-as-a-Service.
Let’s get to some numbers—they are disturbing indeed. The Shadowserver Foundation reported that while South Africa is the most targeted nation on the continent in terms of ransomware attacks (42% compared to Morocco’s second place share of 8%), Morocco leads the continent in two other areas of concern.
Banking trojans and stealers can be installed manually or remotely using social engineering methods, via emails which contain malware links or attachments. Once installed, trojans collect personal data from an infected computer and then communicate this stolen information over the internet to a remote server controlled by the attacker. Morocco is currently the most profoundly affected African nation in which this illicit activity occurs, with over 18,000 detections. (South Africa this time comes in second place with approximately 6,600 such incidents).
Extortion spam schemes can be equally devastating to the victim, and Morocco once again leads the continent with over 69% of all such activity.
So, how will Morocco combat this criminal abomination of human character that causes untold financial and reputational damage?
At the forefront should be educating a citizenry to be far more suspicious prior to divulging personal information over the internet. Decreasing the vulnerability of servers through technological advancements should also play a role. Finally, the growth of formal cybersecurity training programs and the deployment of cybercrime investigation units will undoubtedly be necessary to combat this digital pandemic if Morocco is technologically able to keep pace with and overtake this diabolical criminal element.