Récapinfos

Cameroon Army - Honor and Loyalty : Cyber attacks in Africa

The news of recent times arefilled with stories of formal attacks directed against State or private IT structures. According to the victims, these cybernetic offensives, aimed at spying or paralysing targeted systems, would be the work of professionals more or less encouraged by States in competition with other States. The absence of physical confrontations or pyrotechnic blazes could cause one to believe that we are witnessing children playing in search of mischief. This is not the case, especially not when it comes to shutting down the computer systems of large hospitals, putting the lives of thousands of patients on a knife-edge.

In fact, cyberattacks enter a cycle of power struggles, the violence of which, sometimes stifled, is nonetheless economically disastrous and humanly deadly. The harshness of the battle will also have persuaded the protagonists to invoke the computer patriotism of their citizens, as others before them called on their populations to take up arms.

If so far, the cyber war thus unleashed can be summed up in a history of arms mainly affecting the security, military, industrial, economic and scientific systems of powers of a certain scale, the least advanced nations on all these plans are not spared as much. The ultimate objective of this mobilization being the search for a global hegemony, which will necessarily involve a standardization of linguistic practice, a subversion of the intellectual perspective and a replacement of cultural foundations.

Navy Captain ATONFACK GUEMO Head of Communication Division MINDEF