Technology
Nigeria, S/Africa, Others Record 2 million Phishing Attacks
By Adedapo Adesanya
Internet security solutions giant, Kaspersky, has revealed that phishing activities were diversified as it intensified during the COVID-19 outbreak lockdown with over two million attacks in the second quarter recorded in Africa.
These and other findings were documented in Kaspersky’s new spam and phishing in Q2 2020 report.
According to the analysis, a number of new tricks have also been found – from HR dismissal emails to attacks disguised as delivery notifications. As a result of such tendencies, security solutions detected 2,023,501 phishing attacks in South Africa, Kenya, Egypt, Nigeria, Rwanda and Ethiopia.
Phishing is one of the oldest and most flexible types of social engineering attacks. They are used in many ways, and for different purposes, to lure unwary users to the site and trick them into entering personal information. The latter often includes financial credentials such as bank account passwords or payment card details, or login details for social media accounts.
In the wrong hands, this opens doors to various malicious operations, such as money being stolen or corporate networks being compromised. This makes phishing a popular initial infection method.
Phishing is a strong attack method because it is done at such a large scale. By sending massive waves of emails under the name of legitimate institutions or promoting fake pages, malicious users increase their chances of success in their hunt for innocent people’s credentials.
Kaspersky noted that the first six months of 2020, however, have shown a new aspect to this well-known form of attack.
According to sampled countries, South African users have been influenced the most by this type of threat: there were 616,666 phishing attacks detected in three months. It was followed by Kenya (514,361), Egypt (492,532), Nigeria (299,426), Rwanda (68,931) and Ethiopia (31,585).
In the Q2 analysis, Kaspersky noted that phishers increasingly performed targeted attacks, with most of their focus on small companies. It noted, “To attract attention, fraudsters forged emails and websites from organisations whose products or services could be purchased by potential victims. In the process of making these fake assets, fraudsters often did not even try to make the site appear authentic.”
According to the firm, these fraudsters leveraging on the coronavirus pandemic disguised communications with unsuspecting users ranging from delivery, postal, financial, and HR services.
Commenting on this, Ms Tatyana Sidorina, a security expert at Kaspersky noted, “When summarising the results of the first quarter, we assumed that COVID-19 would be the main topic for spammers and phishers for the past few months. And it certainly happened.
“While there was the rare spam mailing sent out without mentioning the pandemic, phishers adapted their old schemes to make them relevant for the current news agenda, as well as come up with new tricks,” she added.
Kaspersky experts then advised users to take the following measures to protect themselves from phishing. These include: checking online addresses in unknown or unexpected messages; never entering credentials on non-secure or ingenuine websites, and using a proper security solution with behaviour-based anti-phishing technologies.
A global technology company, Zoho, has launched Zia Hubs, a solution within Zoho WorkDrive that brings new forms of unstructured business data into the company’s broad portfolio of applications and AI services.
Using Zia Hubs, organisations can now present any type of business content to Zoho’s powerful capabilities and services—including agentic AI, comprehensive analysis, and accurate, unified search—regardless of file format or structure.
Zia Hubs brings content intelligence to the company’s unified content management and collaboration platform.
Designed with a high level of user control over what content AI is allowed to access, Zia Hubs enables users to organise project or task-specific content into dedicated hubs within WorkDrive.
Each hub serves as a focused space where Zia, Zoho’s flagship AI, can understand and act on the content stored within. This includes a wide range of formats such as PDFs, documents, videos, and audio files.
The platform automatically organises uploaded content by grouping related information—such as section headings, supporting text, and visuals—to preserve context. For video and audio files, Zia generates transcripts and links key moments to relevant topics, making it easier to pinpoint exactly where something was said.
With Zia Hubs, users can surface the most relevant answers when asked a question, even across different content formats. Each response includes clear citations that link back to the original content, whether it is a document, spreadsheet, image, or a specific moment in an audio or video file.
Organisations can also create custom workflows with Zoho Flow, automating document storage processes for particular projects or specific teams. This ensures that Zia always has access to the latest necessary documents automatically.
Furthermore, content from third-party software—such as Docusign PDFs, RingCentral call logs, Zoom video files—are all readable by Zia, and can be automatically placed into a hub by building a workflow with Zoho Flow.
Commenting on this, the Country Head of Zoho Nigeria, Mr Kehinde Ogundare, said, “According to IDC, 80 per cent of business data is unstructured.
“Most unstructured data is text-based, meaning pertinent information lives within email conversations, social media posts, word processor documents, or audio and video transcripts.
“With Zia Hubs built into the full product suite, Zoho can provide customers with a deeper integration than any comparable software platform and nearly limitless potential uses for their data.”
By Modupe Gbadeyanka
A leading telecommunications infrastructure provider, IHS Nigeria, has promised to support the country produce future unicorns.
The company gave this commitment at a virtual town hall session organized by the Ilorin Innovation Hub with the theme From Ilorin to the World: Building a Globally Recognized Technology Hub.
The Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of IHS Nigeria, Mr Kazeem Oladepo, said the Ilorin Innovation Hub would be transformed into a leading destination for talent and technology development across North-Central Nigeria.
“We see the Ilorin Innovation Hub as a platform to attract top talent—not just from Ilorin, but from across the region’s tertiary institutions and tech ecosystem.
“This is an opportunity to build globally impactful companies by harnessing local brilliance with global insight,” Mr Oladepo stated.
Responding to a participant’s question on how individuals could contribute towards the growth of the hub, he encouraged industry experts present to engage directly with the hub’s program managers – future Africa and Cc-Hub, provide mentorship, and help in aligning the training modules with local and global market realities.
“IHS is already investing financial, technical, and intellectual resources into the Hub. But to truly thrive, we need champions within the ecosystem—mentors who’ve built real businesses—to guide young people as they develop transformative ideas,” he noted.
He called for the inclusion of successful professionals and entrepreneurs in the platform’s activities to ensure relevance and adaptability.
“Let’s bring in those who’ve succeeded in fields like e-commerce, logistics, Healthtech, and Data Mining. Their insights can help refine the Hub’s programs and ensure participants extract real value,” Mr Oladepo stated.
Also, the chief executive of Ilorin Innovation Hub, Mr Temi Kolawole, described the town hall as a homecoming for top minds with roots in Kwara State.
“This is a convergence of visionaries—people who’ve built, scaled, and invested in world-class companies—now giving back to shape a collective future.
“Our partnership with IHS Nigeria exemplifies what’s possible when public sector ambition meets private sector expertise,” he noted.
By Modupe Gbadeyanka
Three new features have been added to WhatsApp by Meta to enable users to monetise the popular messaging platform.
A statement from the social media giant disclosed that these new features would allow creators, businesses, and organisations earn from their content under the Updates Tab.
It listed the three updates as channel subscriptions, promoted channels, and Ads in status.
With the latest development, WhatsApp users can ask their clients to subscribe to their channels for exclusive updates.
“We’ve been talking for years about how to build a business on WhatsApp in a way that doesn’t interrupt personal chats. We believe the Updates tab is the right place to introduce that,” Meta said.
“Subscriptions, promotions and ads will appear only on the Updates tab, away from your personal chats. This means if you only use WhatsApp to chat with friends and loved ones, there will be no change to your experience at all,” the company added.
Meta further said, “The Updates tab is where you discover something new on WhatsApp – whether that’s a friend’s status from their wedding day or a creator’s entertaining channel – and it’s now used by 1.5 billion people per day globally. Now the Updates tab is going to be able to help Channel admins, organizations and businesses build and grow.”
“We’ll be rolling this out slowly over the next several months, though for businesses and Channel admins looking to get started,” it said.
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