Cybersecurity: Neurobyte Shield

Most breaches do not begin with a genius exploiting a zero-day. They begin with a person: a reused password, a convincing email, a laptop left unlocked, a supplier with weaker controls than yours. That is good news, because it means most of your defence is within reach of ordinary people doing ordinary things well.

The attackers worth planning for fall into a few groups. Opportunists run automated scans and phishing at scale and take whoever falls for it; you are a target simply for existing. Criminal groups run ransomware as a business, with negotiators and support desks, and pick targets by ability to pay. Insiders, usually careless rather than malicious, cause a large share of real incidents. State-linked actors exist but are not the reason your organisation gets breached.

In Kenya and the wider region the pattern skews toward mobile money fraud, business email compromise (an attacker impersonating a director to redirect a payment), and SIM-swap attacks that defeat SMS-based authentication. Those three deserve more of your attention than anything you will see in a Hollywood plot.

The practical frame for the rest of this course: you are not trying to be unbreakable. You are trying to be harder work than the next target, to notice quickly when something is wrong, and to have already decided what you will do about it.

Case scenario

A finance officer receives an email that appears to come from the managing director, sent from a lookalike domain, asking for an urgent supplier payment before close of business. Work out which category of attacker this is, why the timing was chosen, and which single control would have stopped it.

Practical bit

• List the five most valuable things your organisation holds. Not the most expensive: the things whose loss would hurt most.
• For each one, name who would want it and how they would most plausibly get it. The realistic answer is usually mundane.