Credit Card Fraud and News on Cybercrime in SA

SABRIC’s latest stats reported to the PASA Credit-card Users Committee show a welcome slowdown in overall fraud. ‘Card not present’ fraud has remained stable over the last few reporting periods, although there is a small increase in fraud using foreign cards. As previously, debit cards record more fraud than credit cards in SA – which is not surprising since there are many more debit cards in circulation.  Meanwhile, a new report from IBM shows that the average data breach cost for SA organisations has climbed to a record high. The average cost for a data breach is now R50m. This represents an 8% increase over the last 3 years and a 73% increase since SA was added to the report 8 years ago.

Government however still drags its feet when faced by cybersecurity – the Information Regulator raised some smiles when it slapped the Justice Department with a R5m fine for failing to fix IT breaches quickly enough and for not buying antivirus software, as it had previously ordered the Ministry to do. This is the highest penalty yet imposed for noncompliance with POPIA.