By Adedapo Adesanya

Data breaches in Nigeria increased by 64 per cent, as 82,000 leaked accounts were recorded in the first three months of the year when compared with the last quarter of 2022.

This made Nigeria the 32nd most breached country in the world in the first three months of this year, according to the latest data from cybersecurity company, Surfshark, collected through its independent partners from 29,000 publicly available databases and aggregated by email addresses.

Globally, data breaches declined in the first quarter of 2023, with a total of 41.6 million accounts breached. This is almost 50 per cent less than the nearly 81 million seen in Q4’2022.

The increase in Nigeria’s data breaches moved the country from the previous position of 41 to 32, with around 50,000 breaches recorded in Q4 2022.

Russia was ranked 1st in the world (6.6 million), followed by the United States (5 million), Taiwan (3.9 million), France (3.2 million), and Spain (3.2 million), making the top five.

Taiwan saw the highest quarter-over-quarter increase (21x), placing its total of 4 million leaked accounts 3rd in Q1’2023. The country had only placed 26th in Q4 2022 with 191,000 breached users.

Globally, data breaches declined, dropping to one user account leaked every second in Q1 2023.

“According to Surfshark’s study, data breaches declined globally in the first quarter of 2023 if we compare it to the previous one,” says Agneska Sablovskaja, Lead Researcher at Surfshark. “However, the fact that over 40 million accounts were breached in just a few months is still a cause for concern. Those whose data was compromised are at an increased risk of being targeted by cybercriminals as their personal information can be utilized for phishing attacks, fraud, identity theft, and other serious cybercrimes.”

Surfshark showed that Europe was the most affected region by breaches in Q1’2023, followed by Asia and North America.

In the period under review, Europe was also the only region with a significant quarter-over-quarter increase in its statistics on data breaches. The number nearly doubled, growing from 9.9 million in Q4 2022 to 17.5 million in the first three months of 2023. To put this into perspective, 2 out of 5 accounts breached in Q1 2023 were of European origin, with 38 per cent of these being Russian. Within the region, the biggest quarter-over-quarter spikes in data breaches were recorded in Czechia (almost 9x), Armenia (around 6x), and Switzerland (6x).

Asia was the second-most vulnerable region, accounting for around a fourth of the quarter’s breaches (10.6M). The three countries that saw the highest quarter-over-quarter increase overall were all Asian — Taiwan and Saudi Arabia both had around 20 times more leaked accounts in Q1’2023 than in Q4’2022, while South Korea saw its number increase 12 times.

An additional 13 per cent of the accounts were North American (5.3 million). All other regions comprised less than 5 per cent of the quarter’s total. Out of all regions, Africa saw the greatest quarter-over-quarter decrease — a whopping 33 times, bringing its total of 18.6 million leaked accounts in Q4 2022 down to 557,600  in Q1 2023.

Some of the biggest breaches by email count were Sberbank (Russia), with 2.9M accounts leaked, Weee! (United States) with 1.1M, and Zurich Insurance (Switzerland) with 756,700.

The ten most breached countries of Q1’2023, in descending order, are Russia, the U.S., Taiwan, France, Spain, India, Czechia, South Korea, and Italy. The highest growth in user victims was spotted in Taiwan (21x), Saudi Arabia (19x), South Korea (12x), Czechia (9x), and Armenia (7x).

By Adedapo Adesanya

Social conversation platform, WhatsApp, has announced a new feature that will allow users to lock and hide conversations.

The new feature called Chat Lock will remove a chat thread from the app’s regular onscreen inbox and place it into a new folder that can only be opened by a password or biometric, such as facial recognition or a fingerprint.

Calling it “one more layer of security”, Meta – WhatsApp’s parent company – added that Chat Lock would protect “your most intimate conversations” and hide notifications from them.

“Over the next few months, we’re going to be adding more options for Chat Lock, including locking for companion devices, creating a custom password for your chats so that you can use a unique password different from your phone’s,” Meta wrote in a blog post.

“Locking a chat takes that thread out of the inbox and puts it behind its folder that can only be accessed with your device password or biometric, like a fingerprint. It also automatically hides the contents of that chat in notifications, too,” the past announced.

Users can lock chat by tapping the name of a one-to-one or group and selecting the lock option. To reveal these chats, users will need to slowly pull down their inbox and enter their phone password or biometric alternative.

“We think this feature will be great for people who have reason to share their phones from time to time with a family member or those moments where someone else is holding your phone at the exact moment an extra special chat arrives,” Meta added.

This is the latest feature since it fortified its mobile application with three new security features to protect the personal messages of its users.

Also, it announced that has started allowing in-app payment in Brazil last month.

By Aduragbemi Omiyale

Shareholders of Airtel Africa Plc will get a final dividend of 3.27 cents per share for the 2023 fiscal year, which ended on March 31, 2023, the board has said.

This is as the company showed that it was capable of making investors smile and giving them value for their money despite the tough operating environment across its markets on the continent.

Nigeria, which is its biggest market, has been quite challenging for businesses across different sectors due to high inflation, high cost of operations, currency devaluation, and others.

Despite these headwinds, Airtel Africa increased its total customer base by 9.0 per cent to 140.0 million, as the penetration of mobile data and mobile money services continued to rise, driving a 16.9 per cent increase in data customers to 54.6 million and a 20.4 per cent increase in mobile money customers to 31.5 million.

The telco disclosed in its financial statements filed to the Nigerian Exchange (NGX) Limited that in the period under review, mobile money transaction value increased by 41.3 per cent, with Q4’23 annualised transaction value exceeding $102 billion in constant currency.

Airtel Africa said revenue in constant currency grew by 17.6 per cent in the year, with revenues growing by 11.5 per cent to $5.3 billion in reported currency from $4.7 billion in the 2022 financial year.

It said while each segment’s reported currency revenue growth was impacted by currency devaluation, they all delivered double-digit constant currency revenue growth.

The results showed that mobile service revenue grew by 16.2 per cent in constant currency, driven by voice revenue growth of 11.8 per cent to $2.5 billion from $2.4 billion and data revenue growth of 23.8 per cent to $1.8 billion from $1.5 billion, as mobile money revenue grew by 29.6 per cent in constant currency from $692 million from $553 million.

Also, its underlying EBITDA appreciated by 17.3 per cent in constant currency and 11.4 per cent in reported currency to $2.6 billion, with an underlying EBITDA margin of 49.0 per cent, reflecting the resilience of its operating model despite inflationary cost pressures, though its net profit went down to $750 million.

“Currencies across our footprint have been under pressure, and the impact from the revaluation of our foreign currency-denominated liabilities provided some headwinds in the last financial year.

“While currency devaluation is not in our control, we have plans to continue to mitigate its impact by growing our revenues at a faster pace than devaluation, with double-digit revenue growth in reported currency delivered this year and as we continue to reduce our foreign currency exposure across our balance sheet,” the chief executive of Airtel Africa, Mr Segun Ogunsanya said.