Egypt is the Arab world's most populous country and one of Africa's most connected, with a government that treats cybersecurity as a matter of state. The Supreme Cybersecurity Council sets national strategy, EG-CERT under the telecoms regulator NTRA handles incident response, and Egypt is consistently among Africa's top performers in the ITU's Global Cybersecurity Index.
The legal framework is two laws from the same period: the Anti-Cyber and Information Technology Crimes Law of 2018, which criminalises hacking, online fraud and misuse of networks, and the Personal Data Protection Law of 2020, which created a Personal Data Protection Centre but whose executive regulations were long delayed, so that enforcement has lagged the text. Public breach disclosures are rare compared with South Africa or Kenya, partly for that reason.
What does reach the news, much of it in Arabic, is fraud: fake online shops and social media sellers, phone scams, and the Interior Ministry's cybercrime unit announcing arrests. We summarise Arabic-language stories in English and mark them.
Deputy governor Tarek El-Kholy said the Central Bank of Egypt is tendering for a training environment where bank security staff face simulated attacks, funded with the banking sector development fund at no cost to banks. No launch date yet.
Read at Cairo 24 ↗A Cairo lawyer has asked the public prosecutor to trace fraudsters who posed as him online and took EGP 22,000 from a woman via InstaPay for an Umrah visa that never existed.