Technology
How This AI Alert by Airtel is Transforming Mobile Security in Africa
These days, people rely heavily on their mobile phones for talking, texting, banking, social media, and storing important personal information. Because of this, scammers and spammers often target phone users.
Mobile fraud, like fake SMS messages and scams, is becoming more common and putting millions at risk of losing money or having their private details stolen.
Airtel’s new AI-powered Spam Alert Service offers a smart and timely way to fight back, marking a major step forward in protecting mobile users in Africa.
A brief look at mobile fraud and spam
Mobile fraud and spam are problems around the world, but they hit harder in places where mobile phone use is growing fast, and safety measures haven’t caught up.
A 2024 report from GSMA Mobile Economy shows that more than 20% of mobile users globally have experienced some kind of mobile fraud, with spam texts being one of the most common.
In Nigeria, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has noted a sharp rise in scam messages and fake calls, leading to yearly losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
These spam texts often include fake links, harmful ads, or tricks to steal personal details. Many people get caught without knowing, which can lead to stolen bank money, identity theft, or damaged devices.
Older spam blockers only work on certain phones or apps, leaving many people, especially those using basic phones, without protection.
Why Airtel’s AI Spam Alert Service stands out
Airtel, a top telecom company in Africa, has launched a new and free service called the AI Spam Alert Service. It’s the first of its kind in Africa and aims to protect mobile users from spam text messages as they come in.
What makes this service different is that it doesn’t read or check the actual message content. Instead, it uses advanced artificial intelligence to quickly study the sender’s behaviour using over 250 signs or patterns, all within a fraction of a second.
Some of those parameters, according to Airtel, includes:
- How frequently the sender changes SIM cards.
- The volume and frequency of messages sent by the message initiator to different recipients.
- The geographical spread of the recipient numbers, whether messages are targeted locally or dispersed nationwide.
- Whether the sender receives replies or only sends messages.
- A cross-reference of numbers previously reported for spam activity.
The AI completes this analysis in just 2 milliseconds, faster than the blink of an eye, allowing real-time alerts to subscribers as suspected spam messages arrive.
How Airtel’s Spam Alert Service improves mobile safety and trust
Airtel’s new AI-powered spam alert system is set to make a big difference in mobile security across Nigeria and the rest of Africa. Instead of depending on users to block spam themselves, the service works directly through the network to stop suspicious messages before they reach people’s phones.
This kind of technology helps users feel safer and more confident using mobile networks—especially as more people rely on their phones for banking and other money-related services.
A 2025 report by McKinsey Digital shows that many Africans worry about mobile security when using digital financial tools. By reducing the risk of spam and fraud, Airtel is not only protecting its users but also helping to build a safer digital space where more people can take part in the growing mobile economy.
According to Airtel, within two months of its launch, the spam alert service system has identified 9,667,008 messages as potential spam.
Why this is a game changer
By building a service that is first-of-its-kind in Africa, Airtel is leading the way in offering spam alerts, powered by AI directly on its network, for over 150 million subscribers across the continent.
In addition, the service is quick, spotting suspicious sender activity in just milliseconds without reading users’ messages.
Finally, the service is free and requires no app downloads or extra setup. Airtel says the turns on automatically, making it easy for everyone to stay protected, even those using basic phones.
By sending signals to users before problems happen, Airtel boosts trust and encourages more people to safely use mobile money and other digital services.
Scammers are always finding new ways to trick consumers through the ubiquitous mobile phones, so increased demand for security improvements is, understandably, shifting to telecom companies. Airtel’s AI Spam Alert Service is a strong and timely move toward better, smarter protection for users. As more people start using the service, it should help cut down fraud, keep personal information safe, and make mobile use more enjoyable.
As African economies continue to grow more digital, users of telecom services will need more secure and reliable ways to communicate, and Airtel is leading the way towards that safe future.
By Adedapo Adesanya
Lagos State’s representative, Team Nevo, won the 3 Million Technical Talent (3MTT) South-West Regional Hackathon, on Tuesday, December 9, 2025.
The host state took the victory defeating pitches from other south west states, including Oyo, Ogun, Osun, Ekiti, and Ondo States.
This regional hackathon was a major moment for the 3MTT Programme, bringing together young innovators from across the South-West to showcase practical solutions in AI, software development, cybersecurity, data analysis, and other key areas of Nigeria’s digital future.
Launched by the Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, the hackathon brought together talented young innovators from across the Southwest region to showcase their digital solutions in areas such as Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning, software development, data analysis, and cybersecurity, among others.
“This event not only highlights the potential of youth in South West but also advances the digital economy, fosters innovation, and creates job opportunities for our young people,” said Mr Oluwaseyi Ayodele, the Lagos State Community Manager.
Winning the hackaton was Team Nevo, made up of Miss Lydia Solomon and Mr Teslim Sadiq, whose inclusive AI learning tool which tailors academic learning experiences to skill sets of students got the top nod, with N500,000 in prize money.
Team Oyo represented by Microbiz, an AI business tool solution, came in second place winning N300,000 while Team Ondo’s Fincoach, a tool that guides individuals and businesses in marking smarter financial decisions, came third with N200,000 in prize money.
Others include The Frontiers (Team Osun), Ecocycle (Team Ogun), and Mindbud (Team Ekiti).
Speaking to Business Post, the lead pitcher for Team Nevo, Miss Solomon, noted, “It was a very lovely experience and the opportunity and access that we got was one of a kind,” adding that, “Expect the ‘Nevolution’ as we call it, expect the transformation of the educational sector and how Nevo is going to bring inclusion and a deeper level of understanding and learning to schools all around Nigeria.”
Earlier, during his keynote speech, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Sterling Bank, Mr Abubakar Suleiman, emphasised the need for Nigeria’s budding youth population to tap into the country’s best comparative advantage, drawing parallels with commodities and resources like cocoa, soyabeans, and uranium.
“Tech is our best bet to architect a comparative advantage. The work we are doing with technologies are very vital to levelling the playing field.”
By Aduragbemi Omiyale
One of the high points of the 2025 re:Invent was the unveiling of Graviton5, the fifth generation of custom Arm-based server processors from Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Many tech enthusiasts believe that the company pushed the limits with Graviton5, its most powerful and efficient CPU, frontier agents that can work autonomously for days, an expansion of the Amazon Nova model family, Trainium3 UltraServers, and AWS AI Factories suitable for implementing AI infrastructure in customers’ existing data centres.
Graviton5—the company’s most powerful and efficient CPU
As cloud workloads grow in complexity, organizations face a persistent challenge to deliver faster performance at lower costs and meet sustainability commitments without trade-offs.
AWS’ new Graviton5-based Amazon EC2 M9g delivers up to 25% higher performance than its previous generation, with 192 cores per chip and 5x larger cache.
For the third year in a row, more than half of new CPU capacity added to AWS is powered by Graviton, with 98 per cent of the top 1,000 EC2 customers—including Adobe, Airbnb, Epic Games, Formula 1, Pinterest, SAP, and Siemens—already benefiting from Graviton’s price performance advantages.
Expansion of Nova family of models and pioneers “open training” with Nova Forge
Amazon is expanding its Nova portfolio with four new models that deliver industry-leading price-performance across reasoning, multimodal processing, conversational AI, code generation, and agentic tasks. Nova Forge pioneers “open training,” giving organizations access to pre-trained model checkpoints and the ability to blend proprietary data with Amazon Nova-curated datasets.
Nova Act achieves breakthrough 90% reliability for browser-based UI automation workflows built by early customers. Companies like Reddit are using Nova Forge to replace multiple specialized models with a single solution, while Hertz accelerated development velocity by 5x with Nova Act.
Addition of 3 frontier agents, a new class of AI agents that work as an extension of your software development team
Frontier agents represent a step-change in what agents can do. They’re autonomous, scalable, and can work for hours or days without intervention. AWS announced three frontier agents—Kiro autonomous agent, AWS Security Agent, and AWS DevOps Agent. Kiro autonomous agent acts as a virtual developer for your team, AWS Security Agent is your own security consultant, and AWS DevOps Agent is your on-call operational team.
Companies, including Commonwealth Bank of Australia, SmugMug, and Wester Governors University have used one or more of these agents to transform the software development lifecycle.
Unveiling Trainium3 UltraServers
As AI models grow in size and complexity, training cutting-edge models requires infrastructure investments that only a handful of organizations can afford.
Amazon EC2 Trn3 UltraServers, powered by AWS’s first 3nm AI chip, pack up to 144 Trainium3 chips into a single integrated system, delivering up to 4.4x more compute performance and 4x greater energy efficiency than Trainium2 UltraServers.
Customers achieve 3x higher throughput per chip while delivering 4x faster response times, reducing training times from months to weeks. Customers including Anthropic, Karakuri, Metagenomi, NetoAI, Ricoh, and Splash Music are reducing training and inference costs by up to 50 per cent with Trainium, while Decart is achieving 4x faster inference for real-time generative video at half the cost of GPUs, and Amazon Bedrock is already serving production workloads on Trainium3.
By Adedapo Adesanya
The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) has issued an advisory on new vulnerabilities in ChatGPT that could expose users to data-leakage attacks.
According to the advisory, researchers discovered seven vulnerabilities affecting GPT-4o and GPT-5 models that allow attackers to manipulate ChatGPT through indirect prompt injection.
The agency explained that hidden instructions placed inside webpages, comments, or Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) can trigger unintended commands during regular browsing, summarisation, or search actions.
“By embedding hidden instructions in webpages, comments, or crafted URLs, attackers can cause ChatGPT to execute unintended commands simply through normal browsing, summarization, or search actions,” they stated.
The warning followed rising concerns about AI-powered tools interacting with unsafe web content and the growing dependence on ChatGPT for business, research, and public-sector tasks.
NITDA added that some flaws allow the bypassing of safety controls by masking malicious content behind trusted domains.
Other weaknesses take advantage of markdown rendering bugs, enabling hidden instructions to pass undetected.
It explained that in severe cases, attackers can poison ChatGPT’s memory, forcing the system to retain malicious instructions that influence future conversations
They stated that while OpenAI has fixed parts of the issue, Large-Language Models (LLMs) still struggle to reliably separate genuine user intent from malicious data.
The Agency warned that these vulnerabilities could lead to a range of cybersecurity threats, including unauthorised actions carried out by the model; unintended exposure of user information; manipulated or misleading outputs; and long-term behavioural changes caused by memory poisoning, among others.
It advised Nigerians, businesses, and government institutions to adopt several precautionary steps to stay safe. These include limiting or disabling the browsing and summarisation of untrusted websites within enterprise environments and enabling features like browsing or memory only when necessary.
It also recommended regular updates to deployed GPT-4o and GPT-5 models to ensure known vulnerabilities are patched.
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