Graham Turnbull
Cyber attacks are proliferating in Africa, and organisations across the continent are finding it increasingly difficult to mitigate this risk.
This is according to Graham Turnbull, Account Executive: Sub-Saharan Africa at Cloudflare, who was speaking during a webinar hosted by Cloudflare in partnership with ITWeb.
Turnbull said: “A new Interpol report has warned of a sharp rise in cyber crime in Africa. In East and West Africa, more than 30% of all crime is cyber crime. In southern Africa, one-fifth of all crimes reported were cyber based, and AI-driven deepfakes surged in 2024. The key takeaway is that cyber security has to be part of our fabric in Africa,” he said.
He noted that cyber attacks were becoming cheaper and more effective.
“You as a business need to be prepared for a situation where you run the entire network traffic of a country through your network,” he said.
However, many organisations with legacy networks and hybrid cloud environments have numerous integrations and a sprawling network, complicating security.
Turnbull said: “Digital transformation has led to distributed ecosystems and disjointed security. Distributed ecosystems make IT security more complex, with over 40% of organisations saying they are losing control over their IT and security. Other challenges are that innovation outpaces security and there is growing focus on developing new digital apps and experiences. Legacy network complexity holds back digital progress. We don’t think the modern frontline is the data centre – it’s everywhere your users, data and apps are.”
But the answer isn’t to add more firewalls, he said. “We need to rethink the frontline in a strategic way, because the types of threats you’re going to be facing aren’t the same as they used to be.
“We need to re-imagine the frontline because the frontline is the source of all attacks. Instead of installing new firewalls, you can plug into a network that stops the attacks at the source, not the destination, for a fraction of the cost of building your own network.”
He highlighted Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud – a unified platform of connectivity, security and developer services powered by a programmable network.
“It is a membrane that allows everything to speak to everything else, securely. It allows organisations to connect, protect and build,” Turnbull said.
“We are one of the largest networks in the world, with presence in over 320 cities globally,” Turnbull highlighted.
“Millions of internet properties rely on Cloudflare, and we block over 200 billion cyber threats every day. We also offer a 100% SLA against our network, providing significant stability and balance. Our fully programmable network helps organisations protect and accelerate applications, protect and modernise networks with zero trust services, application services, the Cloudflare developer platform and the Cloudflare global network.
Turnbull added: “Threat intelligence is key, and the more threat intelligence you have, the better your odds. Millions of internet properties globally are behind Cloudflare, which means we have incredible threat intelligence. Our edge is that we have many millions of geographically distributed customers.”
Turnbull also announced that Cloudflare is set to launch a Cloudflare managed services offering, which bridges the gap between our enterprise and small business offerings; as well as a solution to block bots from crawling websites and taking content without permission, and instead allow AI crawlers to interact with the website on a pay-per-crawl basis.
