Capturing the Existential Cyber Security Threats from the Sub-Saharan Africa Zone through Literature Database

Abstract - The Internet brought about the phenomenon known as Cyber-space which is boundless in nature. It is one of the fastest-growing areas of technical infrastructure development over the past decade. Its growth has afforded everyone the opportunity to carry out one or more transactions for personal benefits. The African continent; often branded as ‘backward’ by the Western press has been able to make substantial inroads into the works of Information and Computer Technology (ICT). This rapid transition by Africans into ICT power has thus opened up the opportunities for Cybercriminal perpetrators to seek and target victims worldwide including America for personal financial gains. This existential threat has been growing in bounds and leaps over the past few years that the news media has been awash with cyber-attacks from African countries including Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Zimbabwe, and a host of other African nations. There have been several academic research and articles published on the African cyber-criminal activities by several authors; most of which are in silos and in non-subject specific databases everywhere. Our sponsored summer long project therefore re-analyzed the African style cyber- attacks culminating in the creation of an Access based database that captured the pertinent data about the reported cases through the use of secondary data sources