Cyberattacks in Africa grew faster than the global average over the past decade, with incidents on the continent rising more than 421 percent between 2016 and 2025, according to a Mastercard-commissioned whitepaper released Monday. The report says Mastercard’s cyber intelligence unit recorded 69,236 cyber events targeting African organisations last year — roughly one attack every eight minutes.
Cyberattacks in Africa: scale and trends
The increase in attacks has tracked the rapid expansion of the digital economy. Over the same period, mobile money users grew 5.9 times, digital banking users 4.7 times and the e-commerce market 5.3 times. The report projects Africa’s digital payments economy is on track to reach $1.5 trillion (about Sh193.5 trillion) by 2030.
“As threats become more sophisticated and coordinated, our response has to be just as coordinated,” said Shabir Ahmed, Mastercard’s senior vice-president and customer solutions centre lead for Africa.
Globally, cyber incidents rose 307 percent between 2016 and 2025, the whitepaper shows, underscoring a faster relative surge across African organisations.
Targets and hotspots
Technology firms, the public sector and financial services together accounted for 44 percent of observed attacks, the report states, reflecting the concentration of valuable data and critical services in those sectors. Personal information, financial data and customer-facing services made up 27 percent of the assets targeted.
Nigeria, home to one of Africa’s largest fintech markets, accounted for a significant share of attacks this year, while South Africa’s financial sector was targeted with 12.6 percent of the continent’s attacks. In Kenya, the report highlights the need to protect systems that support financial inclusion, such as mobile money and digital lending platforms.
Skills gap and responses
The whitepaper identifies a shortage of cybersecurity skills as the biggest weakness and the largest investment opportunity. Africa has about 200,000 unfilled cybersecurity jobs, a shortage equal to 23 percent of its current cybersecurity workforce.
To address gaps, Mastercard has set up an Africa Cybersecurity Center of Excellence to bring public and private sector players together to share threat intelligence and run readiness drills. “That is why we launched the Africa Cybersecurity Center of Excellence, bringing the public and private sectors together to share intelligence, knowledge and best practices,” said Mr Ahmed.
Collaboration and enforcement
The report cites joint enforcement actions as evidence that collaboration can yield results. Interpol’s Operation Serengeti 2.0, which ran between June and August last year, led to 1,209 arrests across 18 African countries and recovered $97.4 million (about Sh12.6 billion).
The findings underline how the continent’s rapid digitalisation has attracted increasing attention from cybercriminals and underscore calls for coordinated public–private responses, skills investment and targeted protections for financial-inclusion platforms.
