• Bonginkosi Dlamini, MEC for Gauteng eGovernment, says that the risks to the province’s digital systems “are significant.”
• The department is investing funds and gearing up a strategy to bolster the province’s cybersecurity efforts.
• eGovernment manages the data for all other government departments in Gauteng, so a single breach could prove disastrous.

The digital systems governing Gauteng’s public services are at risk of cyberattack, MEC for the province’s eGovernment department Bonginkosi Dlamini said at an In2IT cybersecurity summit held in Sandton, Johannesburg late last week.

“The risk to the Gauteng provincial government’s services is significant considering that the services we provide impact the daily lives of millions of citizens residing in Gauteng,” said Dlamini.

“A single breach could disrupt essential services, compromise sensitive data and ultimately erode the trust that our people place in government institutions.”

A well-placed cyberattack runs the risk of paralysing all of Gauteng’s digital services, or worse, exposing hoards of private information from residents of South Africa’s most populous province to the dark web.

In 2019, Gauteng power utility CityPower suffered a ransomware attack that left its service inaccessible for several days, including services that allowed the purchase of electricity units.

Cybercriminals only need one target, and that is the department that provides data centre services to all other government departments in the province – eGovernment. Any private information sent in by Gauteng’s residents on any provincial digital service will end up at the department’s compound.

Dlamini says it is the mission of his department to “ensure the safety, processing and storage of all the data across the province.”

“Massive volumes of sensitive data are collected, managed, and stored by the Gauteng Provincial Government. As a result, the stakes in cybersecurity are considerable, from resident records and financial transactions to infrastructure control systems. Therefore, to avoid security breaches with far-reaching effects, eGovernment must prioritize the protection of sensitive data,” reads a statement from the department published earlier in the year.

While the risks are many, there is hope.

The MEC says that eGovernment is investing considerable funds and efforts into strengthening the province’s cybersecurity protections in the inevitable event that cybercriminals attack the province’s systems.

In August, the department said that it would allocate “a portion” of its R1.7 billion budget to bolster the province’s cybersecurity in order to avoid being caught off-guard by threat actors.

“Our task as the department of egovernment is quite critical. We really need to put stringent measures to ensure that our data in the province is secured,” added the MEC.

“It is the role of the department to develop and implement policies aimed to fight against cybercrime such as the Gauteng provincial government cybersecurity strategy.”

“This strategy aims to implement best practices, standards, guidelines and systems that will enable solid cybersecurity for the province. This strategy must be continuously monitored as cybercrime becomes more sophisticated.”

Dlamini says that efforts to bolster the province’s cybersecurity are urgent and that cybersecurity tools are no longer just a “nice to have” but a “critical government, trust and service delivery tool.”

[Image – Gauteng eGovernment on X]