Mário de Oliveira said on the sidelines of the 1st Forum and Expo on Cybersecurity, that currently there are no conditions to exhaustively present the state of the situation in Angola, because “companies have been doing it individually”.
“There is no concentration of data that allows us to assess the country as a whole, but in an individualized way we can say that we are not bad, we are on the right path, we must now join forces in the sense that we can, in a national cybersecurity observatory, give the processing of information, which allows us to look at the country as a whole, in terms of the defense of cyberspace,” he underlined.
The official stressed that the concern now is the creation of legislation, for the defense of cyberspace, in common and generic laws, which speak of data protection, of computer crimes, but Angola needs to “walk towards what is a legal framework to the defense of cyberspace”.
According to the minister, the defense of cyberspace has been done sectorally and corporately, hence the need to create an observatory and rapid response systems to computer crimes.
In the presentation of the first theme on “Cybercrime and Cybersecurity Legislation”, Portuguese lawyer Gonçalo Borges, from the Morais Leitão office, said that in 2022 Angola was the second country in Africa with the highest number of cyberattacks, according to research he carried out.
Gonçalo Borges stressed that other surveys indicated that 15 days ago Angola was in fifth place among 18 African countries suffering the most attacks.
Regarding the subject of laws, the specialist referred that the simple circumstance of a country adopting specific legislation on cybersecurity has a signaling effect for most companies and as an effect the volume of investment by companies in cybersecurity tools.
“I think above all that there is a commitment on the part of the political power to look at cybersecurity and invest in cybersecurity”, he said, stressing that Angola already has the embryo of legal regulation of cybersecurity issues, Law 7/17, on Network Protection and Computer Systems, which already contains a set of very useful principles.
The expert stressed that many of the practices are transnational, which is why cooperation between entities responsible for cybersecurity in various countries is essential, the exchange of information, good practices, and the rules for the administrative functioning of these entities must be agile and simple.
Gonçalo Borges also recommended investment in technical teams trained to respond to events of this nature and “institutional clarity”, that is, it is necessary that the national authority, when challenging, supervising and sanctioning breaches of the cybersecurity regime, has “clear attributions and competences” .
“It has to be properly qualified, in budgetary terms, in technical terms, and it has to have access to information and specialized teams of rapid response to incidents at its disposal”, he indicated, noting that the key is prevention.
