The couple built their own cybersecurity firm to protect people and organisations from the highwaymen of the cyber world. Africa, perhaps more than anywhere else, has more need for more effort on the cybersecurity front as the lack of sophisticated technology and skilled individuals to man the gates put the continent even at greater risk of such attacks.Īnd that’s probably the line of thought that drove married duo, Benson and Ether Mengi, to pull their resources together towards curbing the scourge. This is why cybersecurity is such an important industry one that should, at least, not be battling the talent shortage problem that could well tank things. And that’s not even the worst case scenario. Half that sum already looks like the GDP of a number of countries. Some publications even go as far as claiming l osses of up to USD 600 Bn every year due to cybercrime. Better imagined than witnessed, trust me. Think about someone hacking into a country’s airspace and setting airplanes on a collision course, or someone gaining access to missile technology and effectively starting Armageddon by firing lethal shots at disputing states, or someone hacking into banks and emptying accounts. So, essentially, we are perpetually in danger of cyber attacks and the repercussions can have quite damning implications. Because our world has become more dependent than ever on computers (and that’s actually not a bad thing), there is always the danger of someone trying to gain access for either malicious purposes, or for fun as in the case of our little Aussie.
Well, that’s just the reality of the world we live in today – we’re always at the mercy of cyber attacks whose effects can range from small economic losses to full blown chaos. Designing cybersecurity systems for one of the world’s largest tech companies must feel a bit like protecting a goldfish in a sea full of sharks and one can never be too sure that nobody’s lurking.įree Reads Vodacom South Africa Losses Between ZAR 120 Mn- ZAR 130 Mn Annually To Vandalism And Theftįor all the firewalls and security protocols that the techies at Apple must have put up to protect company and user data, I bet they never thought some teenager halfway around the world who should probably be throwing boomerangs or campaigning for marsupial awareness was going to send them scampering.
The dust has since settled on the matter and truly, it never quite got out of hand but I bet it rocked more than a few boats. I’m guessing the folks at Apple heaved one very big sigh of relief when they learned that the kid was kind of a fan whose desire was to someday be found good enough to work for the tech company. And that’s mostly because the kid was doing it for fun. The then 16-year-old, whose name was withheld for security reasons, became as much a hero as he was a villain when it was discovered that he had been hacking into the private servers of Apple - the world’s first and only trillion-dollar company at the time - and carting away loads of information, which thankfully, weren’t used for anything malicious. It was August last year when global media went into overdrive with the viral story of an Australian kid who got a bite off the “Apple.” Here’s the story of the cybersecurity couple. Their mission? To slam the door in the faces of cyber attackers and with their business, Serensic Africa, they are doing just that. Benson and Esther Mengi are a Tanzanian couple who are united in marriage and in business.