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General News of Wednesday, May 1st, 2019
Source: Ghananewsagency.org
2019-05-01
Photo file
The Cybercrime Unit of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the Ghana Police Service has warned the public against the activities of cybercriminals, who use social engineering to steal data from individuals and unsuspecting companies.
Dr. Herbert Gustav Yankson said that social engineering is the biggest threat to Ghana's cybersecurity space.
He noted that the situation was worrying because it had been taken for granted for a long time, implying that the focus should be on reducing the threat. Social engineering crimes involve the use of deception to obtain a person's confidential identity information.
Often, the scammer uses a false survey or other social study tool that makes the person believe that the investigation is real. This can occur through phone calls, emails or other computer communications, social media websites and text messages.
Dr. Yankson made it known in a workshop to mark; "Girls in ICT" in Accra.
The event, organized by the Ghana Section of the Internet Society (ISOC), focused on "Digital Data Security and Confidentiality – Focusing on Social Engineering".
Dr. Yankson said that social engineering was a thing taken for granted for a long time; adding that: "Nowadays, it is better to be on guard, especially women and girls".
He said that in 2018, statistics showed that fraud was occupying the first position within the anti-cybercrime unit. stating that 60% of their registered cases involved fraud.
"Fraud basically uses deception and that's where social engineering comes in. If most of our business is fraud-related, they are based on all types of social engineering." ", did he declare.
"Through social engineering, our women have things that men want to see, and about 98 to 99 percent of the indicators are that our women take a lot of photos and that means we have a lot of work to do." Dr. Yankson also revealed that badtorsion ranked third, accounting for 15% of all cases.
"The threat to our cyber security in this country comes from social engineering, and that's what we should be working on," he added. He revealed that in 2018, Ghana had lost $ 105 million against cybercrime, where fraud accounted for $ 21 million and $ 49,000 in badtors. Which means that the total of about 22 million dollars has been taken away from the victims through social engineering.
Mr. Marcus Adomey, President of ISOC Ghana, said there is a common misconception that cybercriminals use only the latest tools and techniques to hack into computers or people accounts.
"It's just not true. Cyber criminals have learned that the easiest way to steal information, hack accounts, or infect a system is simply to trick users into making a mistake, "he added.
Mr Adomey said that the 2015 report of a study by Vormetric showed that 90% of cyber-offenses were committed by human error.
He added that studies have also shown that nearly 70% of information thefts have been consciously or unconsciously attempted within the organization. "Indeed, the weakest link, in most cases, is unfortunately the users themselves," he said.
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