Business News of Friday, 17 September 2021
Source: business24.com.gh
2021-09-17
The upsurge in mobile money transactions has its fraud-related challenges
The founder of Ghana’s Silicon Valley and an innovator of fibre optics technologies, Dr. Thomas Owusu Mensah, has called for a roadmap in the country’s cyber space to address the emerging challenges in cybersecurity.
“In a highly complex situation we need to come terms to design a new roadmap to tackle these issues,” said the Ghanaian-American chemical engineer and inventor at the tenth anniversary launch of e-Crime Bureau, a cybersecurity company, in Accra.
“The world today is very different than it was 10 years ago, and even as recent as two years ago. Remote working during Covid-19 and the upward surge in the use of digital platforms to conduct business necessitated by the pandemic in most parts of the world has made us more vulnerable to cyber-attacks,” he added.
In 2011 Ghana had an internet penetration rate of 8.4 percent. This figure has however grown exponentially to 50 percent in 2021, with over 15.7m Ghanaians connected to the internet. The impact on cybersecurity is growing just as rapidly, he pointed out.
“Many institutions in Ghana lack a forensic-ready IT infrastructure and systems to identify and detect incidents when they do occur. We must come to a point of appreciating the reality of the cybercrime landscape and make frantic efforts to invest in technology to guarantee the security we desire in a way to support government and security agencies address teething issues of technology confronting our society today.”
Statistics show that in January this year, there were 8.2m active social media users in Ghana, while data from the central bank also revealed that the total value of mobile money transactions in the country has been growing exponentially.
The upsurge in mobile money transactions has its fraud-related challenges, Dr. Mensah said.
A member of the board of e-Crime Bureau, Kwame Antwi Boasiako, urged all institutions to be cyber-conscious and encouraged the government to adopt new trends to tackle cybersecurity, since it has the potential to derail the progress of the economy.
e-Crime Bureau provides cybersecurity-related services and solutions to private, public sector and international organisations.