Data breaches 'taken too lightly in SA'

Cybercrime and data breaches are nothing new in South Africa, and in recent years there have been several attacks logged across varied industries and government institutions.

- Hein Kaiser

In October 2021, hackers burrowed into the City of Joburg's network infrastructure and demanded a ransom of R500,000, while around the same time, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks targeted major banks.

A DDoS attack occurs when hackers overwhelm a target's IT infrastructure with digital traffic. The end game is usually to disrupt normal operations like making websites or online services of an institution very slow, inaccessible, or crash, eventually going offline.