As revealed in the latest Global Threat Intelligence report by Check Point Research, this represents a 12% increase compared with the same period last year and a slight increase from 4,622 weekly attacks recorded in December 2025.

Across the continent, the average number of attacks per organisation stood at 2,864 per week, a 6% decline year on year. 

However, Nigeria and South Africa experienced intense increases, while countries such as Kenya and Angola recorded drops. 

Angola saw 4,512 weekly attacks, down 7% year on year. Kenya experienced a 41% decline, with 2,172 attacks, while South African organisations faced 2,145 weekly attacks, up 36% from January 2025.

Globally, organisations experienced 2,090 weekly attacks on average, a 17% year-on-year rise. Education remained the most targeted sector worldwide, with 4,364 weekly attacks per organisation, followed by government entities at 2,759 and telecommunications at 2,647. 

In Africa, government, financial services, and consumer goods and services were the sectors most under threat.

Ian van Rensburg, head of Security Engineering for Africa at Check Point Software Technologies, said, “January’s data shows that cyber-attacks are not only increasing but becoming more refined and opportunistic.” 

He urged organisations undergoing digital transformation to strengthen cybersecurity frameworks.

The report also noted risks linked to the rapid adoption of Generative AI tools. One in every 30 AI prompts submitted from corporate networks posed a high level risk of exposing sensitive data, affecting 93% of organisations using these tools. 

Prompts usually contained internal documents, personal identifiers, customer information, or proprietary code. 

On average, organisations employed ten different AI tools monthly, many operating outside formal governance structures, increasing the risk of accidental data leaks and ransomware attacks.

The Nigerian government has responded to the high cyber threats with plans to implement a new cybersecurity framework in 2026. 

The framework will mandate minimum cybersecurity spending, introduce timelines for reporting data breaches, and establish systems for sharing threat intelligence between public and private sectors. 

Kashifu Inuwa, director-general of the National Information Technology Development Agency, noted that many organisations underinvest in cybersecurity, assuming they are unlikely targets.

The peak in cyber attacks in January 2026 alone reemphasises the need for both public and private organisations in Nigeria and other countries, to adopt proactive cybersecurity measures as digital adoption speeds up across banking, fintech, telecommunications, and public services in Nigeria.

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The data places Nigeria at the centre of a continental problem. While Africa’s digital economy is expanding speedily, security readiness is struggling to keep pace. 

Across the continent, organisations recorded an average of 3,153 cyberattacks per week, compared with 1,963 globally, putting Africa among the most targeted regions in the world.

In Nigeria, the financial sector is the main target. Banks, payment platforms, and fintech firms continue to face heavy pressure from phishing, business email compromise, and credential theft. 

Telecoms, energy, and healthcare operators are also seeing growing exposure as cloud services, mobile platforms, and connected devices are rolled out faster than security controls can mature.

The unique part is not just volume, but method. Across Africa, 77% of organisations were affected by information disclosure incidents, meaning sensitive data was exposed through misconfigurations, weak access controls, or unsecured systems. 

Email is the most effective entry point, responsible for 80% of malicious file delivery, showing that basic weaknesses are still being exploited at scale.

Ransomware has also changed shape. The report shows that 41% of major incidents in Africa now involve data-leak extortion, where attackers steal information and threaten public exposure rather than relying solely on system encryption. 

This approach increases reputational damage and regulatory risk, even when core operations remain running.

In Nigeria, identity theft, stolen session tokens, and API abuse are now more common than traditional malware attacks. In simple terms, attackers are logging in using valid credentials instead of forcing their way through defences.

Beyond Nigeria, several African countries are facing high pressure when it comes to cyberattacks. Kenya recorded 3,758 attacks per organisation each week, while South Africa, Morocco, and other markets continue to see heavy targeting of government services, education systems, and telecom infrastructure.

The operational cost of these attacks is rising. African organisations take an average of 18 days to detect and contain a breach, six days longer than the global average. The report links this delay to skills shortages, fragmented tools, and limited incident response capacity across many sectors.

High-profile incidents in 2025 underline the risk. Data exposure at Seychelles Commercial Bank, service disruption at South African Airways, and unauthorised access to customer data at MTN South Africa all followed a similar pattern: customer-facing systems were targeted, investigations were triggered, and trust became the real casualty.

Regulation is now increasing the pressure. With Europe enforcing stricter cybersecurity regulations under the NIS2 directive, African companies that trade with EU partners are expected to prove strong cyber controls as a condition for market access. Security, the report notes, has become a commercial requirement, not a back-office concern.

From Nigeria to the rest of the continent, Africa’s digital growth is speeding up, but attackers are moving just as fast. 

Cybersecurity in Africa has gone beyond preparing for future risks. The threat is already here, and for countries like Nigeria, the cost of inaction is becoming impossible to ignore.

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As the World Economic Forum warned us: We should prepare for a COVID-like global cyber pandemic that will spread faster and further than a biological virus, with an equal or greater economic impact.

To defend against an expanding attack surface, security teams are increasingly adopting new cyber security products to protect networks, cloud infrastructure, IoT devices, as well as users and access. However, stitching together different products from multiple vendors may create security gaps and operational overhead. 

Read more to learn why moving toward security consolidation can significantly enhance security posture, improve security operational efficiency, and greatly reduce TCO (Total Cost of Ownership).

Did the Covid pandemic instigate a cyber pandemic?

Both pandemics perform malicious actions on their victims. While a cyber pandemic affects information systems and associated data.  

Last year, malicious cyber attacks cost $6 trillion USD globally in the form of ransomware, loss of productivity, loss of data, and reputational damage, among others (with Africa alone losing over $4 billion USD to cybercrime each year).

Similarly, the cost inflicted by the Covid pandemic is measured in trillions of USD to the global economy from lockdowns to supply chain disruptions.

As the pandemic caused havoc, remote work became the norm for most office employees. McKinsey estimates that there was an increase in the remote workforce by a factor of 4-5x compared to pre-pandemic levels.

In a matter of weeks, the surface attack widened dramatically, shattering the security perimeter.

This exposed security vulnerabilities on the network, cloud, devices, and access rights, which were exploited by malicious actors to destabilise institutions including hospitals, banks, and governments.

Globally, in 2021, Check Point Research reported a 40% increase in cyberattacks with one out of every 61 organizations being impacted by ransomware each week, and Africa experiencing three times more attacks than the global average.

How to prevent the next pandemic?

With the biological pandemic, politics reacted with stricter lockdowns, vaccination, and re-enforced the health system with complementary infrastructures including testing centers, quarantine hotels/centres, and dedicated areas designed for coronavirus patients at hospitals to cope with the number of patients flowing in waves.

Similarly, CISOs had to react to the widening attack surface by enforcing security policies and the security infrastructure.

CISOs have two options to deal with a widening attack surface. Either one takes a best-of-breed strategy to patchwork the security architecture with multiple vendors, or one consolidates the security architecture with a cyber security suite.  

The latter approach is recommended as it closes security gaps related to misconfiguration and security policies that do not fully overlap when using multiple vendors.

Check Point surveyed over 400 global CISOs to confirm this trend, with 79% of security experts saying that working with multiple security vendors is challenging and 69% agreeing that working with fewer vendors would increase security.

Security consolidation – the benefits

●        Reduced Overhead: Managing individual licenses across the organisation can consume significant resources as each license needs to be purchased, tracked, and renewed individually. An ELA (Enterprise License Agreement) allows a company to use a single license for all vendor services that it consumes across the entire organisation.

● Lower Costs: An ELA is a bulk purchase of a vendor’s service for a fixed period. Often, this comes with large discounts compared to individual, per-seat licenses.

● Decreased Business Impact: With individual licenses, an organisation needs to manage each license and may face business disruptions if one slips through the cracks and expires. With an ELA, an organisation only needs to manage a single license, decreasing the probability that oversight will cause a disruption to operations.

● Reduced Waste: With individual license agreements, an organisation may inadvertently purchase additional licenses for a product while others go to waste or are only used occasionally. An ELA enables an organisation to bundle services and stop spending money on unused services.

● Predictable Spend: With an ELA, an organisation and a vendor agree on a predetermined rate for a vendor’s services for the period of the ELA. This provides a greater degree of predictability than individual user licenses.

● Service Flexibility: ELAs often include the option to claim credits for underused resources that can be applied to other services. This allows an organisation to better tailor its service consumption to its actual needs.

Check Point Infinity ELA – Defining the modern cybersecurity architecture

To meet the demand for security consolidation, Check Point offers an Infinity Enterprise License Agreement (ELA) Suite with a unified management approach to cyber security.

Check Point Infinity is a multi-layered approach to cyber security that protects all IT attack surfaces – networks, cloud, endpoints, mobile, and IoT devices – sharing the same threat prevention technologies, management services, and threat intelligence.

All under a single umbrella and license agreement. The ELA offers access to Check Point’s four product suite pillars:

1.       A unified cloud-native security suite – Check Point CloudGuard;

2.       Network and data centre security – Check Point Quantum;

3.       User & Access security – Check Point Harmony;

4.       Unified security management – Check Point Infinity.

Across Africa, customers in the public sector, financial services, and telecommunications industries are now choosing Check Point Infinity architecture to adopt a consolidated security approach.

By doing so, these businesses are realising preemptive protection against the most advanced attacks, while achieving on average a 50% increase in operational efficiency and a 20% reduction in security costs.

Unlike other consolidated security solutions on the market, Check Point Infinity has a flexible ELA (enterprise license agreement) that can be tailored to individual applications.

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