TECHGhana’s mPharma downsizes | Itana raises $2 million | 40% fintech security issues | AltSchool launches new schools | DRC-based Itot learning services | Flutterwave Expands to India

TECHGhana’s mPharma downsizes amid economic challenges – Ripples News

Ghanaian healthtech platform mPharma, founded in 2014, has made a significant workforce reductions amid challenging economic conditions in Africa.

The startup, which raised around $90 million in funding, including $30 million in 2022, has announced the layoff of 150 employees due to macroeconomic conditions linked to the devaluation of the Naira.

This step is aimed at ensuring the continued service of over 200,000 patients who rely on mPharma’s Mutti service, the startup’s online pharmacy service.

The economic challenges faced by mPharma are not unique. Several startups across Africa have had to take drastic measures to adapt to the tough economic climate. Read more here: 

Itana raises $2 million pre-seed to build Africa’s first digital free zone – Nairametrics

Nigerian startup, Itana, formerly known as Talent City, has raised $2 million in a pre-seed that will power its dream of building Africa’s first digital free zone.

The pre-seed round was led by global venture capitalists LocalGlobe, Amplo, Pronomos Capital, and Future Africa. The deal brings together a powerhouse of deep industry expertise and technical know-how from partners that have backed model digital societies such as e-Estonia and are building products that scale.

Founded by CEO Luqman Edu, Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, and Coco Liu, Itana plans to enable global tech and service companies to situate their African operations from Nigeria, and also take advantage of globally competitive business policies and incentives. Read more here: 

40% of fintech apps in Nigeria have security issues – Nairametrics

Mobile application security company, Appknox, has said that its analysis of fintech apps in Nigeria shows that 40% of the apps are vulnerable to high and critical impact issues.

The Chief Executive Officer/Co-Founder of Appknox, Harshit Agarwal, disclosed this during a round-table meeting organized by CED Technologies and Appknox with the theme, ‘How to think security first in a super-fast mobile economy – Act or React’.

Of the 40%, he said over 80% lack sufficient code obfuscation, 60% have broken/disabled SSL and certificate pinning, 35% are affected by network security misconfiguration and 25% indicate recording of audio and screen activity. Read more here: 

Nigeria’s AltSchool Africa launches new schools to upskill Africans in creative, business industries –  Disrupt Africa

Nigerian skill-to-market platform AltSchool Africa has expanded its learning faculty to introduce creative economy and business schools, following an impressive 40 per cent completion rate in its first year.

Founded in 2021 by Adewale Yusuf and Sultan Akintade, who are also co-founders of another Nigerian ed-tech company TalentQL, AltSchool aims to equip Africans with in-demand tech and employability skills to help them launch their careers.

Taking a non-conventional approach to learning, the tech-enabled platform has traditionally offered courses directly related to in-code and no-code. Strengthening its push in the ed-tech sector, the startup has added content creation, sales, and music business – using Afrobeats as a case study – to its existing nine courses, with applications now open for the first cohort of these new streams.

The startup, which raised a US$1 million pre-seed round in February 2022, has in the last two years facilitated nearly three million hours of training for tech roles, including software engineering, data science, and product design. The new programmes are focused on non-traditional careers beyond the technology field, and are designed to provide a comprehensive and experiential upskilling platform for aspiring learners looking to forge careers in other growing sectors.  Read more here: 

How DRC-based Itot Africa is providing online learning services to upskill African youth – Disrupt Africa

DRC-based startup Itot Africa is providing customised digital content, coding, programming, training and e-learning to businesses, SMEs and entrepreneurs in Africa and the United States.

Itot Africa, an ed-tech startup based in Lubumbashi and launched in 2017, recently received EUR54,000 (US$59,000) in matching funds from the Catalytic Africa initiative, supporting an investment made into the startup by DRC Impact Angels.

The startup’s flagship product Okademy is an online learning, on-demand training and career tracking platform. Meanwhile, with its network of affiliated and trained students, Itot Africa also supports the digitisation process of its clients by creating technology solutions.

“We cater to three primary categories of individuals – those seeking knowledge to fill a personal gap or follow technological trends, those aiming to meet recruitment requirements or find employment, and professionals looking to reinforce their skills,” co-founder Samy Mwamba told Disrupt Africa.

“Our comprehensive services extend beyond training to include recruitment and software development, supporting businesses in their digital transformation journey. We engage our alumni to provide apt solutions based on specific corporate demands. Additionally, companies seeking human resources turn to us for recruitment and placement services, benefiting from our robust database of skilled professionals.” Read more here: 

Africa Payment Giant, Flutterwave, Expands to India – Techeconomy

According to reports, African payments startup Flutterwave has partnered with IndusInd Bank to enter the Indian market. Olugbenga Agboola, Flutterwave Co-Founder and CEO asserts that this move makes Flutterwave the first African company to scale up remittances from India to Africa, easing the process for users.

Agboola, who is currently in India after receiving an invitation from Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to attend the Nigeria-India Business Roundtable that took place on the fringes of the G-20 Summit, stated that Flutterwave will seek out more partners to expand its footprint in India.

A more intensive and clearly defined regulatory partnership between the two nations, he continued, may assist in advancing and encouraging information exchange and technology transfer as well as improving the Nigeria-India remittance corridor. Read more here: 

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Image Credit: Ripples Nigeria

The COVID pandemic and the cost of living crisis have created ideal conditions for fraudsters to exploit the vulnerability and desperation of many households and businesses. And with the use of AI increasing in general, we will likely see a further increase in new types of fraud and is probably contributing to the increased frequency of fraud we are seeing today.

Already, the ability of AI to absorb personal data, such as emails, photographs, videos and voice recordings to imitate people is proving to be a new and unprecedented challenge.

But there is also an upside. The government, banks and other financial organisations are now fighting back with increasingly sophisticated fraud-detection methods. AI and machine learning models could be a part of the solution to deal with the increasing complexity, sophistication and prevalence of such scams.

The rising gap between prices and people’s incomes appears to have made people more receptive to scams which offer grants, rebates and support payments.

Fraudsters often target individuals by posing as genuine organisations. Examples include pretending to be your bank or posing as the government telling you that you are eligible for a lucrative scheme, in order to steal your identity details and then money.

This follows a dramatic rise in recent years of fraudulent applications to government and regional support packages, mainly implemented in response to the pandemic. Here fraudsters often pose as fake businesses to secure multiple loans or grants.

One of the most outlandish examples of this was a Luton man who posed as a Greggs bakery to swindle three local authorities in England out of almost £200,000 worth of COVID small business grants.

The hurried roll out of such schemes for faster economic impact made it difficult for officials to effectively review applications. The UK government’s Department for Business and Trade now estimates that 11% of such loans, roughly £5 billion, were fraudulent. By March 2022 only £762 million had been recovered.

Fraud detection

Over the past few years, complex mathematical models combining traditional statistical techniques and machine learning analysis have shown promise in the early detection of financial statement fraud. This is when companies typically misrepresent or deceive investors into believing they are more profitable than they really are.

One of the breakthroughs has been the incorporation of both financial and non-financial information into data analysis systems. For example, the risk of fraud decreases if there is better corporate governance and a lower proportion of directors who are also executives.

In a small business context, we can think about this as promoting transparency and making sure that important positions do not have sole authority to make significant decisions.

Such data analytics models can be used to rank applications in terms of potential fraud risk, so that the riskiest applications get additional scrutiny by government officials. We are now starting to see implementations of such systems to tackle universal credit fraud, for example.

Banks, financial services providers and insurers are developing machine-learning models to detect financial fraud too. A Bank of England survey published in October 2022 revealed that 72% of financial services firms are already testing and implementing them.

We are also seeing new collaborations in the industry, with the likes of Deutsche Bank partnering with chip maker Nvidia to embed AI into their fraud detection systems.

Risks of AI systems

However, the advent of new automated AI systems bring with it worries of potential unintended biases within them. In a recent trial of a new AI fraud detection system by the Department of Work and Pensions, campaign groups were worried about potential biases.

A common issue that needs to be overcome with such systems is that they work for the majority of people, but are often biased against minority groups. This means if left unadjusted they are disproportionately more likely to flag applications from ethnic minorities as risky.

But AI systems should not be used as a fully automated process to detect and accuse fraud but rather as a tool to assist assessors. They can help auditors and civil servants, for example, to identify cases where greater scrutiny is required and to reduce processing time.

Authors: Laurence Jones, Lecturer in Finance, Bangor University and Adrian Gepp, Professor of Data Analytics, Bangor University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Image Credit: Maksim Shmeljov/Shutterstock

Flutterwave Tuition | cybersecurity laboratory | FinTech collaboration | insurtech MyCover.ai funding | Flex Finance | Co-Creation Hub GIZ innovations

Flutterwave introduces Tuition to help African students pay fees for overseas education – Tech In Africa

The Nigerian fintech firm Flutterwave has launched a trailblazing product named ‘Tuition,’ aiming to address the difficulties parents, guardians, and sponsors face when funding their children’s overseas education. This product seeks to reshape the educational payment framework in Africa and beyond.

Tuition offers a user-friendly payment structure, facilitating parents, guardians, and sponsors to pay assorted fees smoothly to educational boadies within Africa and overseas in their local currencies. This includes an initial roll-out to about 40 institutions in the UK, and it’s anticipated to expand to more institutions across Africa, the UK, the U.S., Canada, France, and Germany as the product increasingly attracts attention. Read more here: 

Nigeria to build cybersecurity laboratory in 2024 – Nairametrics

The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) has said that the agency will be collaborating with the Chartered Institute of Forensic and Certified Fraud Investigator of Nigeria (CIFCFIN) to establish a cybersecurity laboratory next year.

The Director General of the agency, Mr. Kashifu Inuwa, disclosed this while receiving CIFCFIN’s President, Dr. Iliyasu Gashinbak, and his team at the NITDA headquarters.

According to him, the collaboration was necessary to promote digital forensics, reinvigorate the tech ecosystem, and mitigate cybercrimes in the digital space.

The Director-General said that perpetrators of cybercrimes invested well in research, information technology, and powerful tools to launch attacks, adding that taking proactive steps to counter them was non-negotiable. Read more here: 

CBN signs FinTech collaboration agreements with the Central Bank of Egypt – Nairametrics

The Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, has signed a FinTech collaboration agreement with the Central Bank of Egypt. This announcement was disclosed via the official Twitter handle of the apex bank.

The Deputy Governor of CBN, Mrs Aishah Ahmad says the partnership would deepen cross-border regulatory collaboration, and information sharing, boost innovation and grow regional technology investments. This agreement was signed during the “Seamless North Africa 2023” conference at the Egypt International Exhibition Center in New Cairo, Egypt. The Seamless North Africa conference brings together the entire financial ecosystem to discuss, debate and evaluate the future of money.

She said: “We look forward to cultivating an innovative space for fintech startups and entrepreneurs in Egypt and Nigeria to accelerate financial inclusion, deepen our payment systems and drive economic growth across the African Continent.” Read more here: 

Nigerian insurtech startup MyCover.ai secures $1.25m pre-seed funding – Disrupt Africa

Nigerian insurtech startup MyCover.ai has closed a US$1.25 million pre-seed funding round to bolster its in-house operations and tech talent, invest heavily in its proprietary technology, and strategically expand its operations into other African markets.

Founded in 2021, MyCover.ai is focused on addressing the pain points that exist in the African insurance market, such as the lack of access, inadequate coverage, the unaffordability of insurance products and the poor customer experience surrounding insurance processes.

By operating across three essential touchpoints, the company addresses these problems – underwriting and product development, distribution, and insurance claims, where the claims processes are streamlined for insurance companies and the end-users. The company provides an open insurance API that integrates with leading insurance companies, such as Hygeia, Leadway, Sovereign Trust, AIICO Insurance and Allianz, to offer over 30 personalised insurance products, allowing other businesses and innovators to embed these insurance products into their platforms. Read more here:

How Flex Finance helps African businesses save money with its spend management solution – Techpoint

As Internet and smartphone penetration has grown in many parts of Africa, a slew of startups have thrown their hats in the ring, eager to provide a reliable solution for the over 40 million businesses on the continent. Flex Finance, a spend management startup founded by Yemi Olulana, is one of such startups, and hopes to ease the process for African businesses, tapping into an estimated $4.2 trillion worth of B2B spending.

Why is spend management a big deal?

One of the most important benefits of spend management is cash flow management. By accurately tracking a business’ finances, entrepreneurs can avoid unnecessary or unproductive spending and possibly improve profitability in the long run. Spend management can also help businesses decide how to allocate their budget, negotiate better terms with suppliers, and plan effectively.

For many African businesses, the use of manual solutions means they struggle with properly managing their finances. For them, Flex Finance provides an all-in-one solution. Read more here: 

CcHub, GIZ launch to help African universities foster student-led innovations – Disrupt Africa

Co-Creation Hub (CcHub) has announced a new co-funded initiative to support innovation within African universities, in partnership with the Make-IT in Africa project implemented by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).

Called the UNI:NNOVATORS Startups-in-Residence Programme, the new initiative will see CcHub support 30 student-led innovations in Nigeria, Namibia, and Kenya in an effort to strengthen and accelerate the participation of academic institutions in the emerging innovation ecosystem across Africa.

The selected startup teams will participate in a design sprint to improve on their research-based innovations and build prototypes focused on greentech and smart city solutions in specific sectors – agriculture, energy, circular economy, water and healthcare. Read more here: 

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Image Credit: Techinafrica.com

It’s now common in US airports. It’s being used to monitor refugees and identify dead bodies in Ukraine. Even Beyoncé fans have been subjected to it.

And there’s more to come. The UK government is reportedly planning to add facial recognition to the police’s body-worn devices, drones and numberplate cameras. It may soon be very difficult to leave your house without having your face scanned.

There are serious questions about whether the benefits of this technology outweigh such concerns. But steps could be taken to address the issues people are worried about.

Uses and limits

Facial recognition can be used by police to scan many faces in a crowd and compare them with a “watch list” of known criminals. This “live facial recognition” is used with the aim of reducing crime. It can also be used retroactively on recorded CCTV footage.

In the UK, the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 provides a legal basis for the use of surveillance camera systems in a public place.

And according to the government’s surveillance camera code of practice, it’s justifiable to use facial recognition systems in decisions that could negatively affect people, such as whether to arrest them, so long as there is a human in the loop to supervise and make decisions.

So the use of facial recognition systems, or those for other types of biometric information, cannot be used for autonomous decision making, such as automatically tracking a suspect across multiple camera feeds.

Problems with facial recognition

But why should this be of concern to law-abiding citizens? Civil liberties groups argue facial recognition use in public places affects our privacy and freedom, particularly in terms of its ability to track individuals at mass gatherings and to potentially engage in racial profiling.

Security cameras have long captured us as we went about our daily lives. However, authorities easily being able to put a name to a face in the video footage is something we’re not so used to.

The technology creates a situation where many more people could get caught in the sights of the authorities than before. A person’s casual indiscretions or errors of judgement can now be easily tracked and linked to a name and address.

Those with a criminal record could be targeted in public based on their past, regardless of whether they intend to carry out any illegal activity. The technology could provide new opportunities for racial profiling, where authorities track or suspect people based on their background, rather than because of specific information about them.

Facial recognition could also be used against people with no criminal past or plans to commit a crime but who the police simply want to stop, such as protesters. The Metropolitan Police may have announced that facial recognition would not be used to target activists at the coronation, but they also provoked outrage for arresting anti-monarchy demonstrators who were later released without charge.

It’s also important to recognise facial recognition technology still suffers from inaccuracies, which can result in false positive matches where an innocent person is mistaken for a known criminal.

With facial recognition posing such perceived threats, it could have a chilling effect on free speech and demonstrations

What can be done?

However, there are ways that the technology could be used more safely. Law enforcement teams could perform two preliminary steps – activity recognition or event detection – before they resort to face recognition. This approach can help minimise the potential for privacy violations and false positive matches.

Activity recognition refers to the process of identifying and categorising human activities or actions based on CCTV or other sensors. It aims to understand and recognise the activities of individuals or groups, which can include standard activities such as running, sitting or eating.

On the other hand, event detection focuses on identifying specific events or occurrences of interest within a given context. Events can range from simple events like a car passing by or a person entering a room to more complex events like accidents, fights, or more unusual behaviour. Event detection algorithms typically analyse CCTV and other sensors to detect and locate events.

Hence, activity recognition or event detection should be the first step before applying facial recognition to a surveillance camera feed.

Ensuring the data from cameras remains anonymous can also enable police to study the activities of people in the crowd while preserving their privacy. Conducting regular audits and reviews can ensure that the collected data is handled responsibly and in compliance with UK data privacy regulations.

This can also help to address some of the concerns related to transparency and accuracy. By using activity recognition or event detection as a first step, it may be possible to give people more clarity – through signage, for example – about what exactly is going on during police surveillance in a public place.

It is the responsibility of the state to ensure the privacy and security of its citizens in order to foster a healthy society. But if facial recognition is implemented in a way that a significant proportion of citizens feel infringes their rights, it could create a culture of suspicion and a society where few people feel safe expressing themselves publicly.

Author: Nadia Kanwal, Senior Lecturer, Computer Science, Keele University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Image Credit: Image by pikisuperstar on Freepik

However, we have been using AI tools for a long time – from the algorithms used to recommend relevant products on shopping websites, to cars with technology that recognises traffic signs and provides lane positioning. AI is a tool to increase efficiency, process and sort large volumes of data, and offload decision making.

Nevertheless, these tools are open to everyone, including criminals. And we’re already seeing the early stage adoption of AI by criminals. Deepfake technology has been used to generate revenge pornography, for example.

Technology enhances the efficiency of criminal activity. It allows lawbreakers to target a greater number of people and helps them be more plausible. Observing how criminals have adapted to, and adopted, technological advances in the past, can provide some clues as to how they might use AI.

1. A better phishing hook

AI tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard provide writing support, allowing inexperienced writers to craft effective marketing messages, for example. However, this technology could also help criminals sound more believable when contacting potential victims.

Think about all those spam phishing emails and texts that are badly written and easily detected. Being plausible is key to being able to elicit information from a victim.

Phishing is a numbers game: an estimated 3.4 billion spam emails are sent every day. My own calculations show that if criminals were able to improve their messages so that as little as 0.000005% of them now convinced someone to reveal information, it would result in 6.2 million more phishing victims each year.

2. Automated interactions

One of the early uses for AI tools was to automate interactions between customers and services over text, chat messages and the phone. This enabled a faster response to customers and optimised business efficiency. Your first contact with an organisation is likely to be with an AI system, before you get to speak to a human.

Criminals can use the same tools to create automated interactions with large numbers of potential victims, at a scale not possible if it were just carried out by humans. They can impersonate legitimate services like banks over the phone and on email, in an attempt to elicit information that would allow them to steal your money.

3. Deepfakes

AI is really good at generating mathematical models that can be “trained” on large amounts of real-world data, making those models better at a given task. Deepfake technology in video and audio is an example of this. A deepfake act called Metaphysic, recently demonstrated the technology’s potential when they unveiled a video of Simon Cowell singing opera on the television show America’s Got Talent.

This technology is beyond the reach of most criminals, but the ability to use AI to mimic the way a person would respond to texts, write emails, leave voice notes or make phone calls is freely available using AI. So is the data to train it, which can be gathered from videos on social media, for example.

Social media has always been a rich seam for criminals mining information on potential targets. There is now the potential for AI to be used to create a deepfake version of you. This deepfake can be exploited to interact with friends and family, convincing them to hand criminals information on you. Gaining a better insight into your life makes it easier to guess passwords or pins.

4. Brute forcing

Another technique used by criminals called “brute forcing” could also benefit from AI. This is where many combinations of characters and symbols are tried in turn to see if they match your passwords.

That’s why long, complex passwords are safer; they are harder to
guess by this method. Brute forcing is resource intensive, but it’s easier if you know something about the person. For example, this allows lists of potential passwords to be ordered according to priority – increasing the efficiency of the process. For instance, they could start off with combinations that relate to the names of family members or pets.

Algorithms trained on your data could be used to help build these prioritised lists more accurately and target many people at once – so fewer resources are needed. Specific AI tools could be developed that harvest your online data, then analyse it all to build a profile of you.

If, for example, you frequently posted on social media about Taylor Swift, manually going through your posts for password clues would be hard work. Automated tools do this quickly and efficiently. All of this information would go into making the profile, making it easier to guess passwords and pins.

Healthy scepticism

We should not be frightened of AI, as it could bring real benefits to society. But as with any new technology, society needs to adapt to and understand it. Although we take smart phones for granted now, society had to adjust to having them in our lives. They have largely been beneficial, but uncertainties remain, such as a good amount of screen time for children.

As individuals, we should be proactive in our attempts to understand AI, not complacent. We should develop our own approaches to it, maintaining a healthy sense of scepticism. We will need to consider how we verify the validity of what we are reading, hearing or seeing.

These simple acts will help society reap the benefits of AI while ensuring we can protect ourselves from potential harms.

Author: Daniel Prince, Professor of Cyber Security, Lancaster University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Verve partners Alcineo for SoftPoS | Logistics startup, Fez Delivery, secure funding | Funding for Prop-tech startup HouseAfrica | Pirated YouTube software malware Alerts | Access Bank Partners AfriGOPay on Card Development

Firms promote mobile contactless payment – Punch News

Verve has partnered with Alcineo to deploy a software point-of-sale SDK solution. According to the firms, the solution would enable merchants to use mobile phones or mobile devices to accept contactless payments from customers, without the need for additional hardware.

They stated that software solution will leverage Verve’s secure payments platform and Alcineo’s expertise in payment software development. In a statement, the firms said, “The solution is expected to be particularly beneficial to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) often faced with the challenges of accessing traditional point-of-sale systems.

The SoftPOS deployment in Nigeria is expected to further strengthen and contribute to the growth of digital payments in the country, across Africa and other regions where the Verve card is accepted.”

The Managing Director of Verve International, Vincent Ogbunude, said, “We are excited to partner with Alcineo to deploy this innovative SoftPOS solution in Nigeria. Alcineo’s expertise in payment software development will be instrumental in ensuring that the solution is secure, reliable, and easy to use for both merchants and customers. Read more here

Lagos-based startup, Fez Delivery, secures $1M funding – Ripples News

Ventures Platform, a pan-African investor, led the $1 million funding round for Fez Delivery, a last-mile logistics firm with locations throughout Nigeria. Founder and CEO, Seun Alley, confirmed the funding in a statement on Tuesday.

The company said it plans to use the seed investment to deepen its work in Nigeria while it considers expansion into other African markets, including Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa. The funding also saw participation from Voltron Capital, Acasia Ventures, and other angel investors.

“So I like to refer to Fez as running a hybrid model. We have the technology and still own 30% of the assets on our platform. “What that does is that if third-party partners don’t show up for any reason, we have backup and can complete our deliveries by ourselves,” the CEO explained of his company. Read more here

Nigerian prop-tech startup HouseAfrica raises $400k funding round – Disrupt Africa

Nigeria’s HouseAfrica, a prop-tech startup providing real estate digitalisation and transparency tools to property developers and their customers, has raised US$400,000 in funding. Founded in 2019 by Nnamdi Uba and Ndifreke Ikpoku, HouseAfrica aims to enhance the real estate industry’s efficiency and trust by leveraging innovative technologies.

Its flagship product Sytemap.com leverages proprietary blockchain and map technology to create a private land registry, digitising real estate project sitemaps and enabling instant land transaction authentication while growing sales for real estate companies. Sytemap simplifies buying and paying for properties, enabling more people to become digital realtors effortlessly, and is already used by more than 100 real estate companies.

The US$400,000 funding round will be used to deepen the startup’s technology, increase adoption, and grow its team. HouseAfrica is backed by investors such as Future Africa, SSE Angel Network (SSEAN), ARM Labs, CV VC, Startupbootcamp AfriTech, Niche Capital, and Rebel Seed Capital. Read more here  

NCC-CSIRT alerts Nigerians to pirated YouTube software malware – TheGuardian News

Commission renews commitment to industry collaboration, inclusiveness.

The Nigerian Communications Commission’s Computer Security Incident Response Team (NCC-CSIRT) has warned those looking to acquire pirated software and resources that they risk becoming victims of cybercriminal gangs that are using AI-generated YouTube videos to distribute malware.

NCC-CSIRT further warned in its advisory that the consequences of falling victim can be significant for individuals and organisations, resulting in critical damage like data theft, financial loss, identity theft, system damage, and reputation damage.

It said unsuspecting victims, who watch these AI-generated tutorial videos will be duped into clicking on one of the links in the video description, which usually results in the download of data-stealing malware. NCC said the number of YouTube videos containing such links has increased by 200 per cent to 300 per cent month-on-month since November 2022. Read more here

Access Bank Partners AfriGOPay to Provide First National Domestic Card Developed by CBN – Legit News

Access Bank is partnering with AfriGOPay, a financial services company aligned with the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBBS) to launch Nigeria’s first National Domestic Card, created to meet the payment needs of Nigerians. The project initiated by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the NIBBS will provide creative solutions to users of financial institutions in Nigeria, Africa and across the world.

Access Bank launches National Domestic Card Credit: Access Bank’s Deputy Managing Director of Retail Banking, Victor Etuokwu said the bank is the first financial institution in Nigeria to issue the first live card of the National Domestic Card in partnership with AfriGo. He said: “The launch of AfriGO is another milestone in developing a vibrant and rapidly expanding payments industry. Consumers demand value in real-time, not just transactions. With AfriGO, we can provide valuable card benefits, robust loyalty rewards, and a compelling incentive to utilize electronic payments rather than cash. “The AfriGO Card has additional benefits because it is designed to facilitate the growth of Nigeria’s payment ecosystem, thereby supporting more tailored payment services. It will strengthen payment security, expand financial participation, guarantee data sovereignty, eliminate FX dependency, and provide Nigerians several other benefits. Cardholders will enjoy increased affordability and more flexible payment options.” Senior Retail Advisor of Access Bank, Robert Giles said the card operates locally and is designed for Nigeria’s specific needs. The bank has recorded successful purchases of PoS and ATMs beginning from March 14, 2023. Read more here

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Image Credit: Image by vectorpocket on Freepik

Firms Partner To Reduce Cyberattacks | Edtech Accelerator Program | Opportunities In 5G Technology | Agfunder Inviting Agritech Startups | Healthtech Startup Raises $1.65M Investment

Firms partner to reduce cyberattacks – Punch News

Mastercard has partnered with NowNow, a Nigerian digital payment startup to help small and medium-size enterprises to reduce the risk of cyberattacks. According to the firm, there has been a leap in cybercrimes recently.

It stated that SMEs were the main target for cybercriminals since they do not have the resources to help themselves defend against breaches. It said as part of its Start Path Global Programme, it would provide NowNow with operational support, commercial engagement, and the opportunity for strategic investment.

The Executive Vice President, Product Optimisation and Customer Advancement, Cyber and Intelligence at Mastercard, Paul Trueman, said, “As Mastercard brings the next billion people into the digital economy, it is vital that business owners feel as secure and safe from cybercrime as possible. “Our partnership with NowNow is key to achieving this. Whether large or small, businesses deserve the peace of mind to operate knowing that they are being kept safe.” Read more here

CcHUB launches a $15M edtech accelerator program to support startups – TechinAfrica

LAfrica’s biggest innovation hub, Co-Creation Hub (CcHUB), has started “The Edtech Fellowship Program,” a $15 million accelerator program. A statement from the company says that it will back and help 72 startups in Nigeria and Kenya for the next three years.

The program’s goal is to increase the impact of edtech startups and help founders who use technology to improve learning in an education sector with many problems.

This report says that about 98 million children and young people don’t attend school in the sub-Saharan region. This is where most children don’t go to school. Even for people in school, the quality of education is terrible. This makes teaching a good place for edtech startups to grow in the region.

The fellowship program will focus on startups in Nigeria and Kenya, two of the continent’s biggest edtech markets. It will pay for solutions beyond tutorial apps and platforms focusing on rote learning. The program will also give startups access to $100,000 in startup capital to use during the program.

The company wants to help edtech startups by giving them access to shared resources like a product development team, government relations team, pedagogy and learning science team, portfolio management team, communication team, instructional design team, and community building team. Read more here

Exploring opportunities in 5G technology –  TheGuardian

With higher multi-Gbps maximum data speeds of up to 10 Gbps, ultra-low latency, increased reliability, massive network capacity, and increased availability, 5G will drive innovation across every sector, industry and transform everything, as we know it. What does this mean for Nigerians and how will it impact our lives, from the software developer based in Lagos to the grandma in the depths of Makurdi.

According to the World Bank, Nigeria has the highest number of out-of-school children in the world.  5G is able to accelerate the democratisation of inclusive and affordable access to quality education, thus leveling the playing field between children in remote villages and children in cities. 5G can help transform education in Nigeria, as students will be able to download learning materials faster and collaborate in real-time. Medical students are not excluded from this educational experience. They can use augmented reality (AR) to dissect cadavers and diagnose illnesses, among other things. Indeed, 5G technology will advance the educational sector in Nigeria by bringing abstracts to life and introducing a new way of seeing the world. Read more here

GROW Impact Accelerator invites applications from African agritech startups – Tech Gist Africa

The GROW Impact Accelerator is currently accepting applications from agri-tech startups based in Africa. New foodtech and agtech firms that are attempting to solve some of the world’s most pressing sustainability issues are being given a huge boost by the GROW Impact Accelerator, which is funded by AgFunder. The accelerator program intends to hasten the development of several solutions for the manner in which we produce, process, package, transport, eat, and discard our food.

GROW believes that founders should receive comprehensive support; businesses succeed when their founders have the commercial, technical, and professional assistance they require to prosper. Founders can tailor their experience within the program’s cohort-based framework by choosing from a variety of thematic “streams.”

The GROW framework questions your value proposition and business model to make sure they are robust, customer-focused, and scalable. Read more here

Healthtech startup, Envisionit Deep AI, raises $1.65M investment – Ripples News

Female-led healthtech startup, Envisionit Deep AI, has raised a $1.65 million investment from New GX Ventures. The female founder, Dr. Jaishree Naidoo, who was in charge of pediatric radiology at a South African hospital, confirmed the funding in a statement on Friday.

The funding follows closely after the startup emerged as the Southern Africa regional winner at the African Startup Awards. New GX Ventures SA is a joint venture between New GX Capital, RMB Ventures, and GIIG Africa. Read more here

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Fingerprint recognition

Fingerprint recognition is a biometric technology that uses the unique pattern found in your fingerprint to identify you. It has been used for decades but has recently become popular in smartphones. Most smartphones have a fingerprint scanner built into the home button, and it’s often used to unlock your phone or authorise purchases from apps like Apple Pay or Samsung Pay (depending on which brand of phone you have).

There are two main types of scanners: optical scanners detect patterns by shining infrared light at a person’s finger, and capacitive scanners use tiny electrical charges measured against an array of electrodes on the glass surface of the screen or glass panel itself.

Face recognition

Face recognition is automatically identifying or verifying a person from a digital image or a video frame from a video source. It is one of the most popular biometrics used in security systems.

Face recognition has been studied and researched for decades, but only recently has it become more advanced with advances in machine learning algorithms. These days, facial recognition is not limited to humans; it can be done on animals too!

Voice recognition

Voice recognition is the ability of a computer to understand human speech. It uses computer algorithms to recognise the words spoken by a person and can be used in phones, computers and other devices.

Voice recognition can unlock phones or control devices like TVs or computers. It can also be used for dictation: you speak into your phone, and the words appear on the screen as you say them. Voice recognition software is accessible online, and it’s easy to set up with apps like Google Voice Typing (for Android) or Dragon Dictation (for iOS).

AKINGATE Biometrics 2

Iris scanning

Iris scanning is an accurate form of biometric identification that uses the unique pattern of your iris to verify your identity. It can be used in airports and other high-security areas when you’re passing through security checkpoints, as it can reduce wait times significantly.

It’s also possible to use iris scanning in conjunction with other forms of biometric identification—like facial recognition or fingerprinting—to confirm someone’s identity without requiring them to stop what they’re doing or even look up from their phone. Suppose a person has been identified via iris scan, but their face isn’t visible due to poor lighting conditions or some other circumstance that makes facial recognition difficult. Their fingerprints may become visible on the device screen as they press harder on their surface area (which triggers an optical sensor). This could help identify individuals who have been previously scanned but where there was no confirmation available at the time due to poor lighting conditions etc.

Iris scanning is also being integrated into automobiles and smartphones so that drivers can unlock their vehicles simply by standing near them; passengers will need only hold up their hands towards car windshields before being able to unlock doors using gestures made using fingers rather than keys!

Capacitive Touchscreen

A capacitive touchscreen is a type of touchscreen that is sensitive to the presence of a finger or stylus. It is a control display that uses the conductive touch of a human finger or a specialised input device for input and control. It works by sensing the electrical properties of the human body rather than by optical methods such as infrared cameras. Capacitive screens are made up of glass, plastic or ceramic and have an electrode layer sensitive to touch.

Capacitive screens are commonly found in smartphones and tablets because they offer more durability than other screen technologies like resistive touchscreens (which require pressure) or surface acoustic wave (SAW) panels (which can only be built into thin devices).

Video Glasses and Virtual Reality

Biometrics in virtual reality is an expanding technology space being utilised in several interesting areas, including for health and medical uses.

VR uses a headset to immerse you fully into a digital environment. Doing this tricks your brain into thinking that what you see is real—even if it isn’t. To make the experience even more realistic, some headsets utilise motion controls to interact with the digital world just like you would in real life. Virtual reality can be used for security by creating highly detailed simulations of different environments or situations and training people to react when facing such scenarios.

Virtual reality has already been implemented in several areas, like healthcare and education. More recently, it saw its first use in law enforcement training by providing officers with hands-on experiences during active shooter drills where they could practice their response without putting others at risk.

As technology improves over time, we will see an increase in adoption rates among consumers who want access to these technologies at home because they can bring them back from work or school daily!

Biometric Keys for Cars

Biometric keys for cars are a real thing. You may have heard about biometric locks, which use your fingerprint or other biological information to unlock a door or secure area. Biometric car keys work the same way, except they unlock your car instead of just a room or building.

These types of keys offer several advantages over traditional car keys:

• They’re more secure than traditional keys since they rely on your unique body features rather than easily stealable materials like metal and plastic. It’s pretty hard to get someone else’s finger into the lock! (under normal circumstances, we hasten to add).
• They can also be more convenient than using traditional car keys because you don’t need to worry about losing them (or having them stolen). All you’ll need is yourself—and perhaps some patience while you wait for the scanner on your vehicle’s dashboard that reads your biometric print before it unlocks its doors!

Conclusion

Security is constantly evolving, and there will always be more to learn. We must keep an open mind about how our adversaries change and grow their tactics. We can better protect ourselves from harm by keeping an eye on what’s happening around us.

Security is constantly changing and developing. The best way to keep up with new threats is by connecting with others who can share information with you about threats they’ve seen or dealt with recently.

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News reports recount tales of health-care workers being ranked “idle” for not typing while counselling drug patients, and hospice chaplains losing “productivity points” for spending too long with the bereaved or dying.

In the United States 60% of employers with more than 200 workers now use “employee productivity monitoring technologies”, according to market research firm Gartner.

Once loaded on your computer, these tools (with names such as Clever Control, Time Doctor, Staffcop and Work Examiner) can track a dizzying array of data – key strokes, how often you move your mouse, if you are using messaging apps, your search queries and the websites you visit.

They can view your screen and record video from your webcam. Work Examiner boasts it can “record every second of an employee’s screen activity”.

They then turn this into easily digestable data on a dashboard (for your manager), highlighting your active hours and “idle time”, awarding you a productivity score, and ranking you against your colleagues.

This may be happening without you even realising. Even if you are informed, it’s done without your input. Too few mouse clicks? There may be a very good reason, but the software doesn’t care.

These technologies are relatively new but the thinking behind them – that productivity can be reduced to simple measurements, and that workers must be constantly surveilled and managed for maximum efficiency – is relatively old.

More than a century ago techniques to observe and control workers movements intensively were developed into a theory of “scientific management” by US engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor. Tracking mouse clicks remotely is a high-tech version of the same game.

The promises of bossware – of better performance and more control – are tempting to management. But they are also profoundly wrong.

Inventing ‘scientific management’

Taylor, who was born in 1856, developed his management ideas while working at the Midvale Steel Works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he rose through the ranks to become chief engineer.

His book Principles of Scientific Management was published in 1911. The fundamental “science” of management involved intensive surveillance of workers’ activities, breaking them down into constituent parts, and determining the most efficient way everything should be done.

If workers went about drilling holes in different ways, for example, the scientific manager should time each method and then require everyone do it the fastest way. Even if the manager had never handled a drill, the stopwatch enabled them to judge what was most efficient.

Taylor’s book went on to become one of the most influential management books of the 20th century. But it has also been blamed for a “ghastly sublimation of the human spirit”.

Three problems with surveillance

So what’s wrong with excessive managerial surveillance?

First, it can be harmful to health – both mental and physical. This has been well-documented by research on call centres, which pioneered many of the white-collar surveillance techniques now spreading to other workplaces.

Second, measurement techniques create misleading accounts of what workers do. We have reviewed 100 years of performance management research and found that performance management systems are far from “scientific”.

Measurement is not just observation. It requires reducing work to elements that can be categorised and compared.

A “productivity score” based on measuring keystrokes and mouse clicks illustrates this starkly. It involves a misleading simplification. A stopwatch cannot tell whether a hole was drilled with precision or not. Neither can a mouse tracker capture a worker’s thoughtfulness and experience.

Third, intensive surveillance can actually decrease outcomes. This has been shown in multiple studies. For example, a 2016 study found intensive surveillance of cleaners prevented them cleaning rooms well. With just three minutes allowed per room, some resorted to scrubbing school floors and bleaching toilets for free on their weekends.

A 2107 study of electronic monitoring of nurses providing home care to the elderly and disabled found a similar loss of work quality.

If they want to improve productivity, managers need to talk with workers. E-surveillance and performance dashboards that allow judgement from a distance, without context, undermine this relationship.

Measuring less, understanding more

The resurgence of management surveillance is a worrying trend.
But the fundamental problem is not the technology. It is managers’ desire – which technology enables – to know more than they can and to trust workers less than they should. Bossware promises managers that illusion.

A different path would be to accept that most people want to work well, and generally know best how to do so. Managers might then measure less, but understand more.

Authors: Dale Tweedie, Senior lecturer, Macquarie University and David Wild, Senior Research Assistant, Macquarie University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

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The mobile phone giants have removed over 200 Chinese apps, including widely downloaded apps like TikTok, at the Indian government’s request in recent years. Similarly, the companies removed LinkedIn, an essential app for professional networking, from Russian app stores at the Russian government’s request.

However, access to apps is just one concern. Developers also regionalize apps, meaning they produce different versions for different countries. This raises the question of whether these apps differ in their security and privacy capabilities based on region.

In a perfect world, access to apps and app security and privacy capabilities would be consistent everywhere. Popular mobile apps should be available without increasing the risk that users are spied on or tracked based on what country they’re in, especially given that not every country has strong data protection regulations.

My colleagues and I recently studied the availability and privacy policies of thousands of globally popular apps on Google Play, the app store for Android devices, in 26 countries. We found differences in app availability, security and privacy.

While our study corroborates reports of takedowns due to government requests, we also found many differences introduced by app developers. We found instances of apps with settings and disclosures that expose users to higher or lower security and privacy risks depending on the country in which they’re downloaded.

Geoblocked apps

The countries and one special administrative region in our study are diverse in location, population and gross domestic product. They include the U.S., Germany, Hungary, Ukraine, Russia, South Korea, Turkey, Hong Kong and India. We also included countries like Iran, Zimbabwe and Tunisia, where it was difficult to collect data. We studied 5,684 globally popular apps, each with over 1 million installs, from the top 22 app categories, including Books and Reference, Education, Medical, and News and Magazines.

Our study showed high amounts of geoblocking, with 3,672 of 5,684 globally popular apps blocked in at least one of our 26 countries. Blocking by developers was significantly higher than takedowns requested by governments in all our countries and app categories. We found that Iran and Tunisia have the highest blocking rates, with apps like Microsoft Office, Adobe Reader, Flipboard and Google Books all unavailable for download.

We found regional overlap in the apps that are geoblocked. In European countries in our study – Germany, Hungary, Ireland and the U.K. – 479 of the same apps were geoblocked. Eight of those, including Blued and USA Today News, were blocked only in the European Union, possibly because of the region’s General Data Protection Regulation. Turkey, Ukraine and Russia also show similar blocking patterns, with high blocking of virtual private network apps in Turkey and Russia, which is consistent with the recent upsurge of surveillance laws.

Of the 61 country-specific takedowns by Google, 36 were unique to South Korea, including 17 gambling and gaming apps taken down in accordance with the national prohibition on online gambling. While the Indian government’s takedown of Chinese apps happened with full public disclosure, surprisingly most of the takedowns we observed occurred without much public awareness or debate.

Differences in security and privacy

The apps we downloaded from Google Play also showed differences based on country in their security and privacy capabilities. One hundred twenty-seven apps varied in what the apps were allowed to access on users’ mobile phones, 49 of which had additional permissions deemed “dangerous” by Google. Apps in Bahrain, Tunisia and Canada requested the most additional dangerous permissions.

Three VPN apps enable clear text communication in some countries, which allows unauthorized access to users’ communications. One hundred and eighteen apps varied in the number of ad trackers included in an app in some countries, with the categories Games, Entertainment and Social, with Iran and Ukraine having the most increases in the number of ad trackers compared to the baseline number common to all countries.

One hundred and three apps have differences based on country in their privacy policies. Users in countries not covered by data protection regulations, such as GDPR in the EU and the California Consumer Privacy Act in the U.S., are at higher privacy risk. For instance, 71 apps available from Google Play have clauses to comply with GDPR only in the EU and CCPA only in the U.S. Twenty-eight apps that use dangerous permissions make no mention of it, despite Google’s policy requiring them to do so.

The role of app stores

App stores allow developers to target their apps to users based on a wide array of factors, including their country and their device’s specific features. Though Google has taken some steps toward transparency in its app store, our research shows that there are shortcomings in Google’s auditing of the app ecosystem, some of which could put users’ security and privacy at risk.

Potentially also as a result of app store policies in some countries, app stores that specialize in specific regions of the world are becoming increasingly popular. However, these app stores may not have adequate vetting policies, thereby allowing altered versions of apps to reach users. For example, a national government could pressure a developer to provide a version of an app that includes backdoor access. There is no straightforward way for users to distinguish an altered app from an unaltered one.

Our research provides several recommendations to app store proprietors to address the issues we found:

• Better moderate their country targeting features
• Provide detailed transparency reports on app takedowns
• Vet apps for differences based on country or region
• Push for transparency from developers on their need for the differences
• Host app privacy policies themselves to ensure their availability when the policies are blocked in certain countries

Author: Renuka Kumar, Ph.D. student in Computer Science and Engineering, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

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