- Cyber Defence Shifts to Human Behaviour as VIA, CSA Deepen Awareness Partnership
Ghana’s cybersecurity challenge is increasingly moving beyond firewalls, monitoring systems and sophisticated software towards a more difficult frontier: human behaviour.
The renewed partnership between Virtual InfoSec Africa and the Cyber Security Authority to intensify cybersecurity awareness therefore carries significance beyond a conventional institutional collaboration. It reflects a growing recognition that protecting Ghana’s rapidly digitising economy will require not only stronger technical infrastructure but also users capable of recognising and resisting increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.
The partnership forms part of activities marking Cyber Security Awareness Month and comes at a time when more financial transactions, public services, corporate operations and everyday communications are moving online. That expansion has created significant economic opportunities, but it has also widened the number of potential entry points available to cybercriminals.
For Ghana, cybersecurity is therefore becoming less of an information technology issue and more of an economic resilience problem. Mobile money, online banking, e-commerce, cloud-based business systems and digital public services depend fundamentally on trust, and that trust can be damaged quickly when consumers or companies believe their data and transactions are unsafe.
Norvisi Addo, Head of Security Operations at Virtual InfoSec Africa, said the central vulnerability often lies not in technology itself but in the people using it. “Our major reason is that the work we do does not happen in isolation. We live in an ecosystem. When we provide solutions to support organisations and protect important assets, it is said in cybersecurity that the weakest link is people,” he said.
The observation captures a difficult reality for corporate Ghana. A company can invest heavily in security operations centres, endpoint protection, access controls and threat detection, but one compromised password, fraudulent link or successful social-engineering attempt can still undermine those defences.
That is why cybersecurity awareness should increasingly be treated as part of enterprise risk management rather than as a publicity exercise. Human error can create operational, financial and reputational consequences that are just as serious as failures in physical infrastructure or financial controls.
Mr Addo argued that organisations must therefore educate both employees and customers about their responsibilities when interacting with digital systems. “We can put every system in place, but we need to educate people about what they need to do. Otherwise, all your efforts will be in vain,” he said.
The implication for businesses is significant. Cybersecurity expenditure should increasingly be regarded as an investment in business continuity, particularly as companies become more dependent on digital platforms for payments, communications, customer management and supply-chain operations.
A serious cyber incident can interrupt production, expose confidential information, trigger financial losses and damage customer confidence. For banks, telecoms companies, fintechs and other institutions handling sensitive personal and financial data, the reputational effects can be particularly severe.
The renewed VIA-CSA partnership is therefore attempting to move cybersecurity further upstream, from incident response towards prevention. That is a more economical approach because the cost of stopping a breach before it occurs is generally lower than the cost of forensic investigation, containment, system recovery and lost business after an attack succeeds.
Benjamin Avornyotse, Head of Corporate Affairs at the Cyber Security Authority, said awareness and capacity building should form a central part of that preventive approach. “I think cybersecurity is more about letting people know what they must not do, rather than waiting for the event to happen before you respond. So awareness creation and capacity building is key,” he said.
The emphasis on prevention is particularly important as digital threats become more sophisticated. Criminals increasingly exploit urgency, impersonation and trust rather than relying only on technical vulnerabilities, making ordinary users an important part of the security perimeter.
That means annual awareness campaigns will not be enough. Employees require repeated training, organisations need regular testing of their internal controls, customers need practical guidance and institutions must create clear procedures for reporting suspicious activity.
The private sector can play an important role in expanding that effort. Mr Avornyotse said Virtual InfoSec Africa provides support that allows the CSA to widen its outreach beyond major urban centres and strengthen the national cybersecurity conversation through the media.
“What Virtual InfoSec does is to provide the necessary support and a buffer that we need to reach out—both by getting out to the countryside and getting people to know what the situation is, and also by intensifying our conversation in the media,” he said.
The geographical dimension is important because Ghana’s digital transformation is no longer confined to corporate offices in Accra. Mobile connectivity and digital financial services have extended participation in the digital economy to communities across the country, including users who may have limited exposure to cybersecurity education.
That creates a broader policy challenge. Digital inclusion without digital safety can increase vulnerability, particularly where first-time users are unfamiliar with phishing, impersonation, password security or fraudulent payment requests.
The partnership therefore has the potential to become a wider digital-literacy intervention if awareness messages are practical, accessible and adapted to different categories of users. Cybersecurity communication that relies too heavily on technical language may fail to reach precisely the people most at risk.
There are also important corporate-governance implications. Boards and senior management can no longer treat cyber risk as the exclusive responsibility of IT departments, because a major breach can affect revenue, legal exposure, regulatory compliance, customer relationships and business continuity.
Cybersecurity should therefore increasingly sit alongside financial, operational and strategic risks in boardroom discussions. Management teams need to understand not only whether the company owns security technology, but whether employees use it correctly and whether incident-response processes are tested and understood.
Virtual InfoSec Africa’s role also illustrates the growing importance of indigenous cybersecurity expertise. The company has previously been involved in major cybersecurity infrastructure, including work associated with the Financial Industry Command Security Operations Centre for the Bank of Ghana, and has secured a Tier 1 cybersecurity licence from the CSA.
Building local capability matters because Ghana’s digital-security needs are becoming increasingly complex. Domestic cybersecurity companies can bring context-specific understanding of local institutions, user behaviour and threat patterns while reducing excessive dependence on external expertise.
Technology will nevertheless remain only one component of the solution. Ghana’s next stage of cybersecurity development will require regulation, private-sector investment, enforcement, technical capacity and behavioural change to work together.
Mr Addo said there are already signs that awareness is improving. “Nowadays, we are seeing adverts from almost every corporate organisation about cybersecurity, which did not happen before. It is all because of the awareness,” he said.
That change is encouraging, but awareness by itself is not the final objective. The real test is whether employees and consumers behave differently when confronted with suspicious links, unusual payment requests, unfamiliar devices or attempts to obtain personal information.
For Ghana’s increasingly digital economy, secure behaviour must become routine rather than reactive. That means using stronger authentication, protecting credentials, verifying requests and reporting suspicious activity before losses occur.
The wider economic significance is substantial. As more commerce, finance and public services migrate online, cybersecurity becomes part of the infrastructure of growth in much the same way as power, telecommunications and payments.
Businesses that recognise that early will be better positioned to protect operations and preserve customer confidence. Institutions that treat cybersecurity only as a compliance requirement risk discovering that their technical investments are weaker than the behaviour of the people operating them.
The renewed VIA-CSA partnership should therefore be viewed as part of Ghana’s broader effort to build trust around digitalisation. The country can expand digital access rapidly, but the economic benefits will be sustainable only if users believe the systems they depend on are safe.
Ghana’s cyber defence is consequently becoming a contest not only over technology but over behaviour. Firewalls and monitoring platforms remain essential, but the next major gains in digital resilience may come from something far harder to engineer: making secure behaviour habitual across businesses, public institutions and households.
