AI-driven malicious breaches on the rise in South Africa

According to INTERPOL’s African Cyberthreat Assessment Report 2026, AI was linked to more than half of the cyber crime cases recorded in Africa in 2025. Southern Africa was the continent’s most targeted region, accounting for 92% of Africa’s ransomware detections and 70% of business e-mail compromise detections. Riaz Moola, founder and CEO of HyperionDev, says AI is making attacks more convincing and easier to scale, exposing employees beyond IT departments to threats involving payments, passwords and access permissions.

Attackers have adopted AI faster than most organisations have learned to recognise it,

Training should extend beyond security teams to finance, executives and their assistants, human resources and recruitment, customer service and call centre staff, and legal and compliance teams, Moola says.