Information provided by the international intelligence and research unit states that there are no countries exempt from the eyes of computer data invaders around the world, and the financial cost continues to increase. Angola, for example, has seen its public institutions frequently attacked. The CMC, although it says it has not lost anything relevant, has its website offline to this day.
Attacks from hackers across the world, with the United States of America topping the list of most affected countries. At a global level, in 2023 alone, it is estimated that cyber threats will have caused global economic losses of 8 billion dollars, with forecasts for 2025 pointing to an increase of 11%, to 10.5 billion dollars. The data is from Check Point Research, an international intelligence and research unit.
According to the entity’s study, in possession of the Kianda Mail, attacks increased from one in 13 companies in 2022 to one in 10 in 2023, a 33% increase in one year. In total, there are almost 60,000 hacking attempts per company per year worldwide, or 1,158 hacking attempts per company per week.
The United States of America (USA) tops the list of the most affected countries, having accumulated costs in the order of 9.48 million dollars. Although the USA, Canada, the Middle East and Europe are the preferred geographies of hackersAfrica continues to experience an increase in these threats.
Angola, for example, a country that competes with South Africa for leadership of SADC, has registered a significant increase in these practices aimed at invading and stealing computer data.
The Capital Market Commission (CMC), the body responsible for guaranteeing the efficiency, equity, security and transparency of the capital market, was recently the target of an attack by hackers. The attack was so complex that the entity chose to host its information on the Ministry of Finance website instead of repairing the damage, and preparing to stop future attacks.
It is still difficult to estimate the Angolan costs of computer attacks, given the lack of transparency in information, and in many cases, the facts are even made known to the press by anonymous sources, instead of through the communication channel of the affected institutions. .
Unlike CMC, which was unable or chose not to recover its website as quickly as possible, in 2019, Sonangol, the state-owned oil company, was the target of a computer attack that left it completely paralyzed.
According to several media outlets, this computer terrorism action coincided with the “Angola Oil & Gas” conference being held in Luanda, which brought together around 500 managers linked to these two areas and was attended by President João Lourenço.
Os “hackers“, according to the national and foreign press, they accessed more than 7,000 of the company’s computers, from which they extracted privileged information. The attack reportedly left the company’s management “disoriented”.
Still in December 2021, the Angolan Consulate General in Lisbon, Portugal, suffered a computer attack aimed at its database, which was significantly damaged.
As a concrete consequence of the attack, the entire computer system was affected for around a month, and documents such as ID card, birth certificate, power of attorney, marriage process, safe conduct, invoices and payment records, vouchers and other accounting records were deleted. they were completely “erased” from the system, and after almost three years, there is no explanation to taxpayers about the total and official assessment of the damage that this “data blackout” will have caused to the Angolan State.
