The Current Status of Cyber Security in Ethiopia

The increase in cyber attacks in Ethiopia has become a crucial point. Ethiopia is a low-income country and cannot afford the cost of data breaches. Unless institutions in Ethiopia give careful attention to the protection of their valuable assets such as people, information, technology, and facilities from evolving cyber-attacks, their overall security, privacy, and credibility will be a question mark. The paper attempts to present the current status of cybersecurity in Ethiopia and answers the following key questions: (1) Is there any research or expert report concerning cybersecurity in Ethiopia? (2) What are the significant contributions made by prior researchers? and (3) What are researchability gaps in the reviewed research? Qualitative techniques are used to analyze the data. The finding reveals that Ethiopia has no standardized legal cybersecurity framework, strategy, and governance at the national level. Only 11.6% of government institutions in Ethiopia have legal frameworks which are being at their trial level, while a majority, or 87.4% of them have no recognized legal frameworks to prevent cyber attacks. In addition, lack of awareness and lack of expertise in cybersecurity also contributed to the increasing level of cyber attacks in the country. To address the aforementioned issues and challenges, some local researchers are developing cybersecurity frameworks and strategies for some sectors such as banks, railway industries, Ethiopian Electric Power, Ethiopian Electric Utility, and Ethio Telecom. However, those frameworks were not rigorously tested. Moreover, to overcome the acute shortage of cybersecurity professionals and lack of cybersecurity know-how in the country, future researchers should be focusing on the development of a virtual training system or intelligent security tutoring system, so that stakeholders in various institutions can learn cybersecurity basics by interacting with the machine