The workshop is unfolding under the theme, “Privacy and Data Protection in the Digital Era: Challenges, opportunities, and Trends in Cameroon”.

Attendees at the workshop include officials from Government Ministries, Municipal Councils, and Administrators of local e-commerce platforms, local content providers, and other major players in the ICT sector interested in ANTIC’s work in building a secured digital economy.

The Data Protection Workshop seeks to strengthen the capacities of all stakeholders in the effective use of ICT with emphasis on data security and protection of online personal data, which are vital for an emergent Cameroon.

According to experts, more and more enterprises and organizations are processing a huge quantity of information or data as they carry out their businesses. This increased use of data, experts argue, makes businesses grow, transforms markets, and drives productivity among other things.

On the flip side, the use of the internet and big data has equally left many organizations and enterprises very vulnerable.

To demonstrate how precarious the situation is, the Director-General of ANTIC, Professor Ebot Ebot Enaw revealed that within the framework of its mission of securing the national cyberspace, ANTIC has carried out several activities aimed at combating personal data and privacy-related cybercrimes notably:

Vulnerability scans and security audit missions, through which approximately 68,000 vulnerabilities inherent in the information systems of audited organizations have been identified and recommendations formulated to correct them before they get exploited by cybercriminals;

The Identification of 4242 fake Facebook accounts since 2019, used by unscrupulous individuals to scam uninformed citizens, of which 3337 have been closed, thanks to the assistance of Facebook.

Thirty-nine Facebook accounts belonging to ministries and members of the government have been verified with the assistance of ANTIC, in a bid to enable citizens to distinguish between fake and authentic accounts;

More than 2050 complaints relating to scamming and phishing have been received and treated since 209 at the level of ANTIC;

The securing of several critical applications of the state including the COLEPS application of the Ministry of Public Contracts which allows for the secure bidding for public contracts online among other things.

For this reason, ANTIC calls on Cameroonians, especially officials of enterprises and organizations to take cybersecurity seriously.

Mr. Egbe Besong Divine, South-West Regional head of ANTIC explains that organizations need to do more to secure data.

Hear him: “First of all, you need to locate where your data is, carry out a risk assessment, identify all the risks, threats, and vulnerabilities, prioritize them and try to treat them. When you find out that the risk is high, you put some certain controls and those controls need to be constantly monitored.”

Apart from these, users will be drilled on the measures put in place by the government as well as share experiences on what could be done to enhance cybersecurity and the protection of big data.