Africa’s leading cyber security firm, LAWtrust, has warned that South African businesses must act to protect themselves and their customers – as the world battles a second wave of cyber attacks in the past month.

Keeping track of the latest security standards and ensuring you are secure from threats online is one thing, getting your head around the various acronyms is another. You know you need to secure your website, but what is it that makes the lock appear and the address bar turn green in website browsers… HTTPS… SSL or TLS.

DURBAN - As European authorities reel from a mass ransomware cyber attack that also infected Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), local cyber experts say South African companies and government departments must brace themselves.

If you thought your family photographs were unlikely to find their way into the grubby paws of computer hackers and be held for ransom‚ you may want to reconsider.

According to cyber security expert Dr Aleksandar Valjarevic, head of professional services at LAWtrust, a leading expert on cybersecurity in Africa, the most effective way to prevent cyber attacks would be to update operating systems and ensure that company policies are in place to make employees aware of the risks which are involved.

Robust ransomware WannaCry made headlines over the weekend for infecting thousands of computers worldwide. Maeson Maherry, solutions director at LAWtrust, says the attacks highlight why it is important to encrypt information in-house, before it is encrypted by malware.

Email remains any firm’s most important business tool, and 43-trillion emails are sent annually – with company employees each receiving about 100 daily. Yet it is one of the weakest links in terms of cyber security.

The WannaCry ransomware attack underlines that encryption is an essential layer of modern online security, says LAWtrust solutions director Maeson Maherry.

Protecting personal identity is at the heart of all internet security, says South Africa’s LAWtrust, a specialist online security provider. To find out why, and how this affects you and your business, pop by the LAWtrust stand at this year’s ITWeb Security Summit, at Vodaworld on 17 May