The
Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Ghana Association of Bankers, D.K
Mensah, has expressed regret that Ghana has been identified as a major
hub for cybercrimes.
The CEO made this known at the opening of a training workshop on E-Crime and Countermeasures in Accra, yesterday.
According to Mensah, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime(UNODC) on Globalization of Crimes in 2010 highlighted the problem of cyber criminality in Ghana in particular - and the West Africa sub region.
He referred to Ghana’s recent inclusion among the top ten cybercrime offending nations by the Internet Crime Complaint Center (ICC) through its yearly Internet Fraud Report.
Mensah described cases of e-mail-related fraud targeting organizations, hacking attempts targeting government and corporate websites as well as the use of spyware key loggers by insiders in collaboration with external perpetrators to facilitate fraud as worrying examples of the nature of the problems in the country.
He observed that despite these developments, the awareness of employees of corporate organisations relative to e-crime was below the minimum cyber security threshold, while businesses lagged behind in the implementation of proactive information security measures to detect and prevent e-crimes.
He congratulated the organisers of the Programme, particularly the e-crime Bureau and the Business & Financial Times (B&FT), for advancing the awareness of e-crime and its countermeasures through the training.
The Founder and the Principal Consultant of E-crime Bureau, Albert Antwi-Boasiako, said his assessment of industry’s readiness to deal with cybercrime issues is that this was also below the minimum cyber security threshold, hence the need for national effort.
According to Antwi-Boasiako, it became obvious during his assessment that some business decision makers were not well-informed about cyber security issues and the threat of cybercrimes to their businesses. Additionally, most corporate sector employees were not aware of the basic cybercrime and cyber security issues, whilst others had not identified the need for information security personnel to manage corporate cyber security issues and their challenges.
He urged organisations to take issues on internet fraud more seriously and train their staff accordingly.
