News from Scamadviser

As part of the Safe. Shop Trustmark service, EFSA supports Scamadviser. EFSA members can register on this service to ensure that they are not identified as spammers. This is extremely important when doing business outside Africa. Many African URLs are automatically considered to be spam by European and American ISPs. Scamadviser now registers more than 2 million websites a month, and the current site, set-up in 2012, is no longer able to handle the increase in visitors, data and functionality. Scamadviser tells us that the migration is going according to plan and hopes to launch a new back-end system mid-September. This will allow faster direct access to data and the launch of new features to fight online scammers. For example, from January to April more than 130.000 domain names related to COVID virus were claimed. Together with Checkmark, Scamadviser identified scams like selling masks but not delivering, fake donation sites, fake cures, etc. The results have been handed over to Europol for action. Scamadviser is also in discussions with SABRIC in SA in the battle against online fraud.

One of the new skill sets in great need is cybersecurity. There is a global need for cybersecurity experts, and, as this Newsletter has constantly stressed. It is heartening to see that Girls in Tech has teamed up with Trend Micro to create a Cybersecurity Fundamentals course. Meanwhile, as proof of the problem, a report, ‘The State of Cloud Security 2020,’ by Sophos a cyber-security firm, estimates that over 86% of Nigerian organisations have experienced a public cloud security incident last year. This included ransomware (34%), other malware (43%), exposed data (57%), compromised accounts (46%), and crypto-jacking (26%).