Page 20 - EngineerIT April May Issue 2026

Your next cyberattack is already

inside your system

By Justin Render, with Robert Swanepoel – Technology Expert for sub-Saharan Africa at Kaspersky

Cyberattacks are no longer events that arrive without warning. They are built in advance,
tested quietly and deployed when the moment is right. As Africa’s digital economy
expands, many organisations are discovering that the real risk is not the attack they see,
but the one already inside their environment.

“The next attack is already in motion.”

yber threats are becoming more persistent, I asked Robert Swanepoel, Technology Expert for
more targeted and harder to detect. As systems sub-Saharan Africa at Kaspersky, about what
Cgrow more connected and attack methods more organisations should really be preparing for.
sophisticated, the focus is shifting from prevention alone
to visibility, response and resilience. Q: When you talk about “your next attack”, what
should organisations be picturing?
“The next attack is already in motion. What has
changed most is the sheer scale and complexity. We
are seeing around 500,000 new malicious samples
every day, which is beyond what human teams can
manage on their own. At the same time, attackers
are using AI across the full lifecycle of an attack, from
development to execution. It is still a cat-and-mouse
game, but it is moving faster and becoming more
Robert Swanepoel complex.”

20 | EngineerIT April/May 2026