TITLE:
Artificial Intelligence Adoption for Cybersecurity in Africa
AUTHORS:
Nadine Nibigira, Vincent Havyarimana, Zhu Xiao
KEYWORDS:
Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cybersecurity, Cyberattacks, Cybercriminals
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Information Security,
Vol.15 No.2,
March
21,
2024
ABSTRACT: Legacy-based threat detection systems have not been
able to keep up with the exponential growth in scope, frequency, and effect of cybersecurity
threats. Artificial intelligence is being used as a result to help with the
issue. This paper’s primary goal is to examine how African nations are
utilizing artificial intelligence to defend their infrastructure against
cyberattacks. Artificial intelligence (AI) systems will make decisions that
impact Africa’s future. The lack of technical expertise, the labor pool,
financial resources, data limitations, uncertainty, lack of structured data,
absence of government policies, ethics, user attitudes, insufficient investment
in research and development, and the requirement for more adaptable and dynamic
regulatory systems all pose obstacles to the adoption of AI technologies in
Africa. The paper discusses how African countries are adopting artificial
intelligence solutions for cybersecurity. And it shows the impact of AI to
identify shadow data, monitor for abnormalities in data access and alert cyber
security professionals about potential threats by anyone accessing the data or
sensitive information saving valuable time in detecting and remediating issues
in real-time. The study finds that 69.16% of African companies are implementing
information security strategies and of these, 45% said they use technologies
based on AI algorithms. This study finds that a large number of African
businesses use tools that can track and analyze user behaviour in designated
areas and spot anomalies, such as new users, strange IP addresses and login
activity, changes to permissions on files, folders, and other resources, and
the copying or erasure of massive amounts of data. Thus, we discover that just
18.18% of the target has no national cybersecurity strategy or policy. The
study proposes using big data security analytics to integrate AI. Adopting it
would be beneficial for all African nations, as it provides a range of
cyberattack defense techniques.