AI-Powered Deepfakes and Phishing Put Africa on High Alert, Microsoft Report
Microsoft has issued a stark warning to African businesses, highlighting a new wave of sophisticated, AI-driven cyber threats in its 2025 Digital Defense Report. The report, unveiled on Wednesday and based on 100 trillion daily security signals, details how attackers are using AI-enhanced phishing, deepfakes, and digital twinning to target the continent with increasing precision.
The report warns that Africa is not merely a target but is actively being used as a “proving ground” for the latest cyberattack methods before they are deployed globally.
“Africa isn’t just a target; it has become a proving ground for the latest cyber threats,” said Kerissa Varma, Microsoft’s Chief Security Advisor for Africa. “We’re witnessing attackers harness AI to craft phishing messages tailored to local languages and cultural contexts, impersonate trusted individuals, and exploit the very platforms we depend on.”
The primary motive is increasingly financial. Last year, 80% of incidents investigated by Microsoft involved data theft for monetary gain, rather than intelligence gathering. This trend is corroborated by the World Economic Forum, which found that the total value of cybercrime across 19 African countries surged from $192 million to $484 million, as the number of victims jumped from 35,000 to 87,000.
BEC Tops Ransomware in Financial Damage
While ransomware dominates headlines, the report identifies Business Email Compromise (BEC) as the most financially damaging threat. Although BEC accounted for just 2% of observed threats, it was the outcome in 21% of all successful attacks, surpassing ransomware (16%).
These attacks often involve sophisticated, multi-stage chains, including inbox rule manipulation, multi-factor authentication (MFA) tampering, and email thread hijacking to build trust.
The report flags South Africa as a global hotspot for BEC infrastructure setup and money mule recruitment. It details the operations of Storm-2126, a Nigerian-origin threat actor operating from South Africa, to illustrate the transnational nature of these crimes, which have targeted firms in the U.S. and beyond.
AI: The 50-Fold Profitability Booster
The integration of artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming the threat landscape. According to the report, AI-enhanced phishing campaigns now achieve a 54% click-through rate, 4.5 times higher than traditional methods, and can boost the profitability of an attack by up to 50-fold.
Attackers are also deploying autonomous malware capable of lateral movement and privilege escalation without human oversight. In addition, deepfakes and voice cloning are being used for synthetic identity fraud at scale. Microsoft reports a 195% global increase in AI-generated IDs, which are used to bypass identity verification, exploit free trials, or launch attacks.
Attackers are also refining social engineering tactics, such as “ClickFix,” where users are tricked into manually executing malicious code, and impersonating IT support via Microsoft Teams to gain remote access.
“This is a pivotal moment for African business leaders,” Varma concluded. “Defenders must fundamentally rethink their approaches to cyber resilience. Relying on trust alone is no longer enough… Critical cyberattacks often unfold beyond the reach of traditional endpoint detection.”
In response, Microsoft is promoting its Secure Future Initiative, the largest cybersecurity engineering project in its history, to help organizations in Africa build resilience against these emerging threats.
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