Lesotho must step up efforts to educate its citizens about cybersecurity so that they do not fall prey to internet crimes that are on the proliferation, an official from the country’s communications ministry has said.
Khiba Masiu was speaking during the 2024 Cybersecurity Summit Lesotho in Maseru on Wednesday. Hosted by Lehaha Institute, the summit will run until Thursday.
The advent of technology and its aggressive advancement had left internet consumers open to lots of cybercrimes. And Lesotho, as a third world country, was still far behind in coming up with legislative infrastructure that can enable it to catch up with the developed world, he said.
According to the 2024 Cybersecurity Index report, Lesotho falls in Tier 4 and Masiu said there was need for robust legal framework for the country to perform well.
He said there were five key areas that Lesotho needed to focus on; namely legal measures, technical measures, organisational measures, capacity building and cooperation.
“In the last report (2023), we were in Tier 5 but now we are in Tier 4 which means there has been an effort to improve,”Masiu said.
moderates a panel discussion during the summit on Wednesday
But there were still impediments among them the lack of an act of parliament and Lesotho was one of only two countries in the Southern Africa Development Community (Sadc) that did not have an act. The other country in Namibia, he said.
As a result, on the legal measures score of the CGI, Lesotho recorded a measly 7.54 out of a possible 20.
Lesotho passed a Cybersecurity Bill 2013 but it has failed to be enacted because of the high turnover of governments in the last 12 years. Since 2012, Lesotho has had five different governments and Masiu said this was a challenge as each time his department came close to making progress, there would be a new administration and they would have to start over.
Therefore, there was a need to finalise the legislation and develop technical standards and response capabilities, establish a national cybersecurity strategy, expand capacity building.
The long term goal should be achieving a high GCI ranking by strengthening cybersecurity capabilities across all pillars, he said.
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A low technical measures score of just 2.75 out of 20 was recorded and while this was problematic, it presented an opportunity to invest in technical infrastructure and skilled professionals to improve threat detection, Masiu said.
On organisational measures, Lesotho scored just 3.85 out of 20 because of low coordination and strategy while on capacity building, it scored 5.27 out of 20.
“The whole society must be trained to deal with cybersecurity,”Masiu said.
The highest score Lesotho achieved was on cooperation where it achieved 11.17 out of 20 but Masiu said this too needed to be improved so that the country achieved at least 15 out of 20.
