18 CYBER CRIME & CYBER SECURITY TRENDS IN AFRICA Compounding the problem is the fact that many Africans are still using outdated, or in many cases unlicensed, software. In fact, one of the drivers behind the increasing rates of cyber crime in Africa could be the widespread use of outdated or unlicensed software programs. According to the Business Software Alliance’s annual Global Software Survey reports that approximately 57% of software used in Africa and the Middle East is unlicensed.4 Nearly one quarter of users in Africa are currently using the operating system, Microsoft Windows XP which was first released in 2001, and for which software patches were discontinued in 2014.5 Major Security Vulnerabilities in Three Quarters of Websites Globally Web administrators still struggle to stay current on patches There were over one million web attacks globally against people each and every day in 2015. Many people believe that keeping to well-known, legitimate websites will keep them safe from online crime. This is not true. Cyber criminals continue to take advantage of vulnerabilities in legitimate websites to infect users, because website administrators fail to secure their websites. More than 75 percent of all legitimate websites have unpatched vulnerabilities. Fifteen percent of legitimate websites have vulnerabilities deemed ‘critical,’ which means it takes trivial effort for cyber criminals to gain access and manipulate these sites for their own purposes. It’s time for website administrators to step up and address the risks more aggressively. 4 5 http://globalstudy.bsa.org/2016/index.html http://www.uneca.org/sites/default/files/PublicationFiles/ntis_policy_brief_1.pdf Scanned Websites with Vulnerabilities TT    A critical vulnerability is one which, if exploited, may allow malicious code to be run without user interaction, potentially resulting in a data breach and further compromise of visitors to the affected websites. 2013 2014 2015 77+23 76+24 78+22 77% 76% 78% -1% pts +2% pts Percentage of Vulnerabilities Which Were Critical 2013 2014 2015 16+84 20+80 15+85 16% 20% 15% +4% pts -5% pts