TechCabal Daily – “All over the dark web”

Sensitive data belonging to South Africans including employment details and personal identification numbers are crawling the dark web in the aftermath of a July data breach at credit bureau, Experian. Last month, 24 million individuals and 700,000 businesses were embroiled in a data breach which CEO, Ferdie Pieterse said was as a result of the company trying to do business with a cyberthief impersonating as the director of a well known company. The service they offered said impersonator involved the release of certain information but Experian said no sensitive credit information was obtained by the fraudster.

In a statement in August, the company said: “We have identified the suspect and confirm that Experian South Africa was successful in obtaining and executing an
Anton Piller order which resulted in the individual’s hardware being impounded and the misappropriated data being secured and deleted.”

The Information Regulator, South Africa is concerned the company has downplayed the impact of the data breach. And anonymous sources have told MyBroadBand Tech that sensitive information from the breach are all over the Internet. Cybersecurity company, Orange Cyberdefense says it has found 25,055,050 total records contained in numerous CSV files; 21,263,393 unique records and 1,263,435 unique email addresses contained in the leaked data among others. In-depth personal and financial information are said to be contained in the leaked data making rounds online.Experian says its “global security teams have not observed evidence to suggest that these files are circulating on the Internet” and consider the reports unfounded
and misleading.

Why is all of this a drawn out issue?
First concern is that the country has seen an increase in cybersecurity breaches in the last four months. As at August, there were a total of 25, 19 of which were self-reported. On an individual level, in the wrong hands, data can become a tool for a lot of things from identity theft to prejudice. For the hundreds of thousands of companies involved, well, how else do you impersonate the director of another well known company?

Femtech company Kasha has received a US$1 million funding from the
International Development Finance Corporation (IDFC). Kasha, which is currently present in Rwanda and Kenya, is an omnichannel commence company for women’s wellness and beauty products. The United States’ IDFC finances businesses across a diverse range of sectors in the developing world. In the last quarter, the corporation has invested over US$3.6 billion in more than 30 deals
in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and other emerging markets. Kenyan e-commerce company Copia also received a US$5 million equity funding.

Pan African hub network, AfriLabs and internet company Mozilla have partnered to organise discussions between the company and African innovators, entrepreneurs, developers and startups. The exercise is geared towards a research project to enable the internet company better understand the sector in the continent. The hub network says the goal of the discussions is to understand the capabilities of the region, “explore under-served issues and areas that could spur the next generation of innovation”. Mozilla’s Firefox is one of the top five web browsers in use on the continent.