A cyber risks assessment of some 41 critical infrastructure of eighteen (18) companies and institutions carried out by ANTIC across the country in 2022 has revealed that the risk-level of these infrastructure stands as follows: high - 25%; medium - 60.09% and low - 14%. Though these statistics indicate a slight decline with regard to high and low risk-levels recorded in 2019, the medium risk-level has rather witnessed a 19.29% increase as compared to the situation in 2019 which stood at 40.80%.
These statistics were made public by ANTIC’s Director General, Prof. Ebot Ebot Enaw, during an assessment restitution workshop that brought together administrators of the assessed infrastructure, 27-28 October 2022 in Yaounde. Prof. Ebot stated that the most salient vulnerabilities identified had to do with misconfigurations of network services, lack of malware protection and removable media control mechanisms as well as coded incident management procedures. These risks had in recent years exposed Cameroon to asymmetric cyber-attacks, orchestrated by malicious individuals resulting in enormous material damage, disruption of business processes as well as paralysing the social wellbeing of the population, he noted.
For these risks to be reduced to the barest minimum, ANTIC has opted to establish a Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) squad for each sector of activity - water, electricity, transport, telecommunications and finance with a view to curbing cyber threats. The body, which will take the form of a working group with a collaborative platform, will enable enterprises to share information on the cyber threats they face, in an effort to increase their response and anticipation capacities, facilitate the integration of security solutions deployed for their information systems by ANTIC's IDS/Honeypot probes.
The creation of the platform Prof. Ebot Ebot Enaw quipped is part of measures ANTIC has envisaged to create and foster a culture of cyber risk management, security and resilience of Cameroon’s critical infrastructure. Such an endeavour is indispensable to the sustainability and resilience of Cameroon’s socio-economic wellbeing since critical infrastructure are assets that guarantee the proper functioning of the economy and contribute to the effective provision of vital resources and services, such as energy transport, telecommunications, finance as well as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) Systems, which are now connected to the Internet and consequently exposed to cyber-attacks.
