South African workers fear spying of drones

by TINTSWALO BALOYI 
JOHANNESBURG – ABOUT half of South African employees are “afraid” of drone spying.

This amid corporate spies and hackers using drones to get trade secrets, confidential information, and other sensitive data from corporations and data centres.

Kaspersky made the findings during its Business Digitisation survey.

It established 44 percent of the South African employees were “afraid” of spying from drones.

Overall, 63 percent of employees surveyed in the country said their company would benefit from installing drone detection systems to protect the business from spying.

The cyber security company explained counter drone technology is a system used to detect, classify, and mitigate drones.

These systems employ a wide combination of sensors, including radars, radio frequency analysers, cameras, lidars, jammers and other sensors, to track, analyse drone activity.

Overall, 75 percent of employees surveyed fear cyber espionage within their industry.

The most frequent concerns about espionage are that it could lead to organisations losing money (mentioned by 35 percent of respondents) and intellectual property (29 percent) as well as harming business reputation (17 percent).

“Our research showed that most business representatives understand the dangers of cyber espionage,” said Andrew Voges, General Manager for Africa at Kaspersky.

“Getting information on the tactics, techniques and procedures used by cyber spies helps organisations adapt their defenses and develop counter-measures to thwart these tactics effectively.”

Cyber espionage is typically carried out by the means of phishing, malware, exploits and targeted attacks.

“…but today we also need to take the threat of drone spying into account,” Voges said.

– CAJ News