Kigali hosts banking, cyber security workshop in March

A conference to address increased cyber crime in Africa’s financial institutions will be held on March 23 in Kigali, Rwanda. The meeting comes at a time when more than 2,000 Kenyan websites have been hacked into in a period of a year.

The conference, a partnership between Security Africa and technology companies Secure Payment Solutions (SPS) and IBM, will highlight key information technology (IT) security threats, risk, and regulatory issues affecting financial institutions, government agencies and public and private organisations in their operations.

“The banking and cyber security workshop will bring together key stakeholders from governments, law enforcement agencies, finance institutions, and leading ICT security experts to help find a lasting solution to cyber crime,” said Sammy Kioko, Cyber Sec Africa manager, which is organising the event.

Targeted participants include bank managers, compliance personnel, information technology managers, IT security managers, and information security policy developers.

The meeting comes at a time when various system improvements adopted by organisations in Eastern and Central Africa to rein

in high rates of fraud have proved futile with fraudsters becoming smarter, skimming larger amounts of money from banks.

Banks have become the most affected in the scams, with a recent industry survey conducted on banks in Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zambia indicating that threats like hacking, malicious insiders, card skimming, electronic files manipulation, IT controls circumvention, and unauthorised penetration have surged as new core banking systems intended for enhanced IT security become more expensive to acquire and deploy.

Mr Kioko said the event will help players to identify the technical, environmental, and business risks that could lead to service vulnerability.

“It will deliver ideas to help stakeholders articulate and implement appropriate risk management strategies, optimise internal processes, and ensure that systems and hardware infrastructures are robust enough to mitigate risk,” he said.