Ethiopia Needs Legal Cyber Security Auditing Framework: Expert

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ENA November 6/2019 Ethiopia needs to develop a well organized legal framework to tackle the ever-increasing cyber attacks at the national level, Cyber Expert said. 

An expert on cyber security, Dr. Henok Mulugeta, told ENA that currently Ethiopia has no organized system to tackle cyber attacks.

Countries even which have well organized technologies are exposed for the global cyber attacks due to the complexity of its nature, he said.

Cyber attacks have increased from 479, 576 to 791 per annum during the past three successive years in Ethiopia, of which 15 percent of the attacks during the last nine months of 2018/19 were cyber hacking attempts.

About 87.4 percent of the government institutions have not any recognized legal frameworks to tackle cyber attacks though some 11.6 percent are being at their trial level. There is no well developed and governed legal framework at the national level.

Henok urged the country to act swiftly in collaborative manner as cyber security needs governance and management from the highest to the lowest level.

The country needs a well-organized strategy for five or 10 years to manage cyber security attacks otherwise the impact will be become even worse, he noted.

Blocking monetary services be it smart grids or infrastructures, losing public trustworthiness, cyber terrorism, political crisis, economic crisis, national identity, society crisis and sovereignty related attacks.

Referring to a study, Head of Cyber Engineering at Information Network Security Agency (INSA), Tigst Hamid said that most of the attacks observed during the concluded Ethiopian fiscal year were web and infrastructural attacks.

Sources of cyber attacks are employees, partners, well organized criminal, cyber terrorists and government and non government sponsored.

Apart from lack of legal frameworks, lack of awareness on cyber security, lack of well trained human resources and there is poor cyber security governance at the institutional level.

Head of Cyber Governance and Management at INSA, Temesgen Kitaw said for his part that considering the legal frameworks which other countries have been developed, Ethiopia has much to do.

Stressing the complexity of cyber security which needs massive and well qualified human resources, his institution is working in collaboration with the Universities such as Addis Ababa and Mekele.

Ethiopia has begun marking the first cyber security week to raise awareness and build national cyber security capacity starting from Monday.

Ethiopian News Agency
2023