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There was a huge data leak sometime in the past three months at Nigerian airline, Arik Air, according to Justin Paine, the head of trust and safety at Cloudflare. Per a blog post published by Paine, hundreds of thousands of device fingerprints, names, email addresses, last four digits of credit cards, and IP addresses, were among the data leaked from a reportedly mishandled Amazon S3 bucket. Paine said the leak is either a direct fault of Arik’s or one of its payment processors. Arik Air has denied the data leak as well as its use of Amazon’s S3 service. While it is unclear if any of the leaked data was accessed by fraudulent entities, this belies a bigger problem of lax data protection law, not just in Nigeria but all over Africa. This is not the first of its kind in Africa either – South Africa has had several data breaches in the past few years, highlighting a seeming nonchalance by the continent’s top governments to deal with data protection. Beyond how businesses collect, store or use data, potential victims of these breaches have no way of reproach backed by law too (I wrote about it here). In Arik’s case, it took about a month to fix the leak, per Paine, and the airline did not disclose the leak or notify its customers that their data may have been breached. Talk about not giving an eff.

Salihu Ibrahim Dasuki and Naima Hafiz Abubakar, both Lecturers of Information System at Sheffield Hallam University and Bayero University respectively, did a study of how women in Kano, one of Nigeria’s most populated cities, use messaging app WhatsApp. They found that women were able to participate in politics, commerce and share knowledge in ways they were previously unable to. They wrote about the results in more detail in The Conversation.

Nigeria’s Sterling Bank has partnered with MTN Nigeria to launch a mobile device financing service called “PaySmallSmall”. The service will allow people buy mobile devices and pay in installments.

Microsoft, through its 4Afrika initiative, and South Africa-based Centre for Proteomic & Genomic Research (CPGR) have partnered to launch an advanced medical analysis and research platform powered by Azure. The goal of the platform is to allow African scientists and academics to perform and collaborate on ground-breaking genomics research.

South Africa-based fintech company MFS Africa has closed a Series-B funding round led by China-based VC firm LUN Partners Group. The raise is an extension round to a $4.5 million round the company closed earlier this year, and brings the total round of funding to $14 million, per Ventureburn.

Uber has signed a partnership with Suzuki in Kenya to expand its cost-effective UberCHAPCHAP fleet, as it continues to vie for market share with Taxify and other local ride-hailing startups. Stanbic Bank Kenya, which has already financed over 500 vehicles on the UberCHAPCHAP platform, will come on as financing partners.

Melissa Bime has been named winner of the $25K Anzisha Prize, for INFIUSS, her online blood bank and digital supply chain startup, which provides local hospitals with access to blood. INFIUSS currently services 23 hospitals in Cameroon.

Atlassian is having their first meetup in Lagos on Saturday, November 20, 2018 by 11am at the Terrgon Group office in Lagos. If you use Jira, Bitbucket, Confluence, Trello, Bamboo, Stride etc. to improve your Software Development, Project Management, Collaboration, Software, and Code Quality, find more info and registration here.

A week ago, Nigeria-based Terragon Group held a fireside chat event for Adrenaline, its AI-enabled platform which is able to deliver messages to audiences and draw real-time insights from customer feedback or behaviour. Read all about the solution and what went down at the event here.

From TechCabal

+ What it’s like to buy something online from China (in Nigeria)

+ Oolu Solar Is Taking On Nigeria’s $2 Billion A Year Solar Home System Market