The Kenya Bureau of Standards has approved 40 new standards to enhance information and cyber security and safeguard consumer privacy.
The new standards outline various techniques and methods for securing corporate information by an individual or managers charged with the responsibility of ensuring institutional data is safe.
“Consumers are increasingly adopting digital technology, the data generated creates both an opportunity for enterprises to improve customer engagement and a responsibility to keep it safe," managing director Bernard Njiraini said.
He said the new guidelines provide a robust system to fight against cyber security threats, breach of privacy and other information security measures to ensure that Confidentiality, Integrity and Authenticity (CIA) of information is maintained during the creation, usage, storage and transfer of information.
The standards also stipulate a framework for ensuring privacy in information and communication technology systems that store and process personally identifiable information.
The World Economic Forum Report 2017 places technology threats in the top 5 societal and economic risks by likelihood and scale of impact, next to weapons of mass destruction.
The public sector continues to dominate as the primary target of cyberattacks followed by the financial services.
Globally, 40 per cent of SMEs that experience data breach due to cyber security attacks are likely to close within a year.
The new standards will be used by auditors, managers and management teams, trainers and assessors in ICT.
Kenya reported more than 56 million cyber threats for the quarter ended December 2020, according to latest Communication Authority (CA) data.
This is a 59 per cent increase from 35.2 million threats detected in the previous quarter.
Malware attacks were the highest at 46 million, followed by web application attacks at 7.8 million while 2.2 million Distributed Denial of Service(DDOS) out of the threats detected by the National Computer Incident Response Team Coordination Centre.
Kaspersky security solutions in September reported 28 million malware attacks in 2020 and 102 million detections of potentially unwanted programs (pornware, adware among others), where South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria were the most affected.
