Eswatini National Cybersecurity Strategy (NCS) 2025 Hactivism threat actors or hactivist groups tend to attack their targets to promote a political or social agenda. Their motivations are usually either politically or socially motivated. Hacktivist attacks are disruptive in nature and consist of DDoS and website defacements though a few hactivist attacks have inflicted great and sometimes lasting damage to their targets. Eswatini has experienced a number of hactivist related website defacements or DDoS attacks in the past years. 1.2.1.3 Insiders Organisations across the world including those in Eswatini continue to grapple with the cyber threat posed by insiders commonly called insider threat. Employees with access to critical systems and data belonging to their organisations pose a significant threat to these same organisations. They damage the reputation and to a certain extend the financial position of these organisations deliberately. For instance they could leverage their knowledge to launch or facilitate an attack to disrupt critical functions of their organisation, or steal sensitive data from their organisations. Other than these deliberate acts, insiders could also unintentionally cause harm to their organisations. This could be by downloading unsafe content to company computers, clicking on phishing emails, plugging infected USBs to a computer, etc. These insiders could also be targeted by social engineering techniques of cyber criminals and inadvertently execute actions that negatively impact their organisations and benefit cyber criminals. 1.2.1.4 Cyber Terrorism Eswatini is fully aware of global trends on cyber terrorism, which includes the use of Internet and especially social networks to radicalise individuals and recruit members into these terrorist groups. These recruits form terrorist cells that eventually execute cyber-attacks against selected target countries. With the rapid increase in digitisation of developing countries such as Eswatini, there is increasing likelihood that highly technically skilled terrorist groups or lone actors will always emerge with a capability of causing devastating cyber-attacks against target nations. It’s therefore imperative that Eswatini prepares adequately for such scenarios by developing a comprehensive National Cybersecurity Strategy that takes such threats into account. 1.2.1.5 States and state-sponsored threats An emerging threat as observed in the decade is cyber-attacks targeting sovereign nations by either other nations or through state sponsored actors. These nations or state sponsored actors generally seek to unlawfully access either critical information systems, networks or data from targeted states to gain either political, technological, or economic advantages over the targeted nations. Eswatini can potentially become a target of suck an attack, and therefore needs to establish steps to mitigate these threats. Eswatini National Cybersecurity Strategy (NCS) 2025 8