MTN Chief I.T Officer says external bodies can attack a company’s system through pen drives, cautions companies to be on guard

The Chief Information Officer for MTN Ghana, Bernard Acquah has hinted that unfamiliar pen drives could habour security threats and has thus cautioned companies and business owners to be on guard.

“Secure your endpoints. You don’t go to a party and bring the pictures on a pen drive, plug into your computer and share across the entire office. Sometimes you would find out that the pen drive has got something on it that could be used as a backdoor to get into your company. In magazines, you would sometimes find free pen drives and you don’t realize they’ve got something on it. You plug it into your machine and you realize they’ve got a backdoor into your network”.

Bernard Acquah disclosed that most companies that were cyber aware would block all their USB ports to protect the Company.

The Chief Information Officer for MTN Ghana made the disclosure as part of the company’s cyber security month conversations on Monday.

It was held on the theme; “Navigating the Digital world Safely: Awareness, Action, Assurance”.

He mentioned some cyber threats such as malware, phishing, scams and viruses that  could be used to attack a company’s network.

Mr Acquah stated a variety of cyber security solutions that were required to mitigate corporate cyber risks and subsequently urged employees to be cyber security sensitive in order not to put their companies in danger.

“An employee could leave the company at risk of cyber attacks. The employee might be the conduit through which competitive information could be breached. Innocently doing something could lead to your company being at risk to the extent of collapsing the company”.

In this era of A.I., the MTN Chief Information Officer warned officers who put their companies information on ChatGPT to make their work easy to put a stop to it, as they put their companies at risk of cyber attacks.

“This is a hosted platform in the cloud, owned by open AI and everything you put on there goes onto their system so when you are putting sensitive information out there, certainly you are giving it to them. If it gets to an unscrupulous person, anything can happen to that data”, he underscored.

Mr Acquah encouraged all to be cyber security conscious and beware of what they put on the internet.

“The A.I. tools are very efficient in the way they do their work. They work faster than humans. You’ll get  value for what you feed it with but you wouldn’t know what will happen to your data”.

He however emphasized that companies can use A.I. tools for threat detection so “you look at the various parts of your network where there are any vulnerabilities to see how you can strengthen your set up with the A.I. to avoid Cyber attacks”.