Dr Vera Akafo Ayitey, a Lecturer at Valley View University, has asked organisations and institutions to invest in and cultivate a culture of cybersecurity consciousness.
Dr Ayitey, in a presentation on the topic ‘Organisational Culture and Fraud Prevention’, said organisations, be it public or private, should make deliberate efforts to promote cybersecurity awareness and make investment into its training and utilisation.
The occasion was the graduation of students who had completed their training in the Continuous Professional Development Programme at the Chartered Compliance and Cyber Analyst (CCCA) Institute.
She said, ‘Cybersecurity should be of concern in all organisations from the top-level management to the lowest employee. We need to build a culture where cybersecurity is just not a priority but a way of life.’
She gave real situational examples of how various forms of cybercrimes such as ransomware attacks and phishing could affect the activities of organisations and stressed the need for them to
invest in measures and mechanisms to detect and deal with such cases in time.
‘On May 12, 2017, a ransomware called WannaCry was used to attack over 300,000 computers in the US and UK which brought a lot of essential services to a halt. Organisations must be ahead of time to institute proactive reactions instead of reactive ones,’ she said.
Mr Theophilus Kwadjo Odjer-Bio, the Executive Director of the Chartered Compliance and Cyber Analyst (CCCA) Institute, said efforts were being made towards creating national cybersecurity awareness and education through quiz competitions in tertiary institutions across Ghana.
Ghana, between 2016 and 2018, lost 200 million dollars to cyber-related crime. More than half of them, according to the Cybercrime Unit of the Ghana Police Service, were reported as fraud.
Cybercrime, according to statistics from Cybercrime Magazine – a world-leading researcher on the global cyber economy, predicted the world to lose six trillion annually by 2021. The magazine also predicted the g
lobal ransomware damage costs to reach 20 billion dollars from 2021 onwards.
Source: Ghana News Agency