NEWS
Airtel Africa pushes for collaboration in building Africa’ s digital future
According to Airtel Africa’ s Chief Executive Officer, Sunil Taldar, these elements will shape the next decade of Africa’ s telecom revolution, marking a shift from simply connecting people to enabling them to create value through those connections.
In a keynote address at MWC25 Kigali, Taldar said:“ Africa’ s digital decade has begun. The continent that once leapfrogged into mobile telephony is now ready to leap again – into an era where every byte of data fuels productivity and every connection builds prosperity.”
He added:“ Africa is ready for its next leap from access to productivity. This requires partnership – between operators who co-build, technology manufacturers who equip, regulators who enable, investors who believe, tax regimes which support and young Africans who create. Together we can build a continent where data is processed locally, talent is nurtured nationally and innovation is scaled globally.”
Airtel Africa, a leading provider of telecommunications and mobile money services across 14 African countries, has emphasised that industry partnerships, Artificial Intelligence and data centres are essential pillars for delivering Africa’ s digital future.
Taldar further noted that AI will be central to building Africa’ s digital future by making networks smarter and greener, customer experiences more intuitive and mobile money more secure.“ It will also require a connected network of data centres linked by highcapacity fibre to unlock inclusive digital participation even in remote regions,” he said.
NETSCOUT identifies Keymous + as major cyberthreat in North Africa
The latest global threat intelligence report issued by NETSCOUT, a leading provider of observability, AIOps, cybersecurity and distributed denial of service( DDoS) attack protection solutions, has spotlighted Keymous + as a significant cyberthreat actor targeting nations across North Africa and the Middle East.
According to NETSCOUT’ s ATLAS Security Engineering and Response Team( ASERT), the group has launched 249 DDoS attacks across 15 countries and 21 different sectors, with Morocco and Sudan identified among the most affected.
From an industry perspective, government agencies, hospitality and tourism, transportation and logistics, financial services and telecommunications organisations face the highest risk.
Bryan Hamman, NETSCOUT’ s Regional Director for Africa, said:“ Keymous + is leveraging DDoS-for-hire services and compromised devices, making their attacks more accessible and harder to defend against.”
The threat actor employs a variety of attack vectors, including reflection and amplification attacks using protocols such as chargen, Connection-less Lightweight Directory Access Protocol( CLDAP),
Domain Name System( DNS), memcached, Network Time Protocol( NTP), NetBIOS, rpcbind, Simple Network Management Protocol( SNMP), L2TP and Web Services Dynamic Discovery( WS-DD), as well as direct floods over DNS query, User Datagram Protocol( UDP) and Transmission Control Protocol( TCP).
Each attack conducted by Keymous + draws on an average of more than 42,000 unique source Ips.
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