In this episode of ITWeb TV, Adam Smith, cyber lead for Southern Africa at the British High Commission discusses the need for Africa’s governments to work together in improving cyber deterrents, the need to improve cyber skills, why the British High Commission has a cyber lead in Southern Africa, and the rise in state-sponsored cyber activity.
African countries need to come together to build cyber deterrents, and South Africa is well-positioned to lead that union. This is according to Adam Smith, cyber lead for Southern Africa at the British High Commission Pretoria.
Speaking to ITWeb TV, Smith says there has been rapid digitisation across the continent, but the necessary mitigations to cyber threats, from policy to public awareness, have failed to keep pace.
He also highlights “a severe cyber skills gap” across Southern Africa, which he said, affects everything from the frontline tasks of defending networks, to bigger picture roles such as advising governments on policy.
Smith adds there is a need for a mindset shift by national governments, which have been traditionally designed to provide jurisdiction over a physical geography. “Their whole logic is to operate within the bounds of their borders,” he says, adding that there are, however, no borders in cyber space.
He says malicious actors collaborate internationally and use the ubiquity of cyber space, as well as regulatory leniency of individual nations, to their advantage.
“If you actually analyse how the threat actors are operating and how many of them are structuring themselves, it’s completely international; it’s global. They might be using countries which maybe have less rigorous oversight and regulation to launch their operations from, they might be using countries that have more beneficial financial regimes to launder their proceeds through; for example, crypto flows.”
Of course, cyber threats aren’t just from criminals, but state-backed cyber groups are also active, and given escalating international tensions, this is a growing area, he notes.
Geopolitical battleground
“The UK government’s perception is that – what we’re seeing back home in the UK – the world is becoming more geopolitically contested and more dangerous. Conflict is unfortunately on the rise, and this is corresponding to a higher degree of activity, particularly state-sponsored, or terrorists, or activists, hacktivists [carrying out] politically motivated activities.
“I think it’s important to separate that out from the opportunistic financially-driven cyber crime, which is still a huge problem, particularly in Africa, where ransomware is just skyrocketing.”
Adam Smith, cyber lead for Southern Africa at the British High Commission Pretoria. (Photograph by Lesley Moyo)
Smith adds that while African nations might not be involved in some of the international conflicts, the ambitions of other nations are making Africa a geopolitical battleground.
“Africa is a very contested continent, and foreign influences are extremely live here. I suspect that there is a lot of state-linked cyber activity happening,” he warns.
He says governments tend to view cyber threats as a national security issue and focus on it as a domestic issue. But, he says, “It’s inherently international and the response needs to be inherently international.”
Smith says there has been increasing coordination of countries in recent years to agree how cyber activities should be conducted.
“We have had, for example, the cyber crime convention at the United Nations, and we have a new global mechanism, which came out of the UN’s Open-Ended Working Group on cyber.”
He says the importance of multilateral norm-setting as part of the cyber agenda is a major part of the solution. “It forces states with potentially very diverging doctrines or ideas how to respond to this, or what’s right, what’s wrong, to come together and thrash out what the norms need to be.”
But the issue isn’t just limited to governments. It needs to be a multi-stakeholder response, he adds, because governments don’t know everything. “We need to rely on those organisations that actually own and govern the internet, which is the private sector. We need to bring in the crucial voices of civil society, whether that be digital rights activists, or child online safety organisations.”
Smith believes it is a good opportunity for countries, such as South Africa, to show leadership in this area.
“South Africa has a really strong, impressive and vibrant cyber security scene, and we can really encourage African voices against this kind of malicious activity and some really positive leadership.”
Another major area of focus should be on cyber deterrents, which covers the full spectrum of national cyber resilience, from enhancing cyber awareness and education among the general population, to normalising processes such as multifactor authentication. “All the way up to having the sufficient political prioritisation at the top government level to call out the malicious activity, when it’s happening,” he says.
Smith will be participating in a behind-closed-doors session on regional collaboration at the upcoming ITWeb Security Summit 2026.
