We are treating cyber and telecom threats as industry-specific challenges. They are not — they are national threats with national consequences
SA is past the point of needing a National Cybersecurity Resilience Plan. What we now require is an emergency framework — a whole-of-society response mechanism that treats the collapse of digital infrastructure with the same urgency as load-shedding or a banking crisis.
The newly released Communication Risk Information Centre (COMRiC) 2025 sector report is a wake-up call wrapped in data. It documents, with forensic precision, how telecommunications crime has evolved from a nuisance to a systemic threat.
SIM swap fraud, copper cable theft, subscription scams, ransomware attacks and synthetic identities are no longer isolated incidents they are a tightly interlinked network of crimes that now cost SA more than R5.3bn annually.
The report shows commendable progress in areas such as biometric SIM registration and AI-driven fraud detection. But it also reveals a vulnerability that is growing faster than our response capacity.
SA is past the point of needing a National Cybersecurity Resilience Plan. What we now require is an emergency framework — a whole-of-society response mechanism that treats the collapse of digital infrastructure with the same urgency as load-shedding or a banking crisis.
The newly released Communication Risk Information Centre (COMRiC) 2025 sector report is a wake-up call wrapped in data. It documents, with forensic precision, how telecommunications crime has evolved from a nuisance to a systemic threat.
SIM swap fraud, copper cable theft, subscription scams, ransomware attacks and synthetic identities are no longer isolated incidents they are a tightly interlinked network of crimes that now cost SA more than R5.3bn annually.
The report shows commendable progress in areas such as biometric SIM registration and AI-driven fraud detection. But it also reveals a vulnerability that is growing faster than our response capacity.
This article originally appeared on Business Day. Click here to read the full story.