Agenda

INAUGURATION CEREMONY

The National Cyber Mandate: Governance, Strategy, and the Path to a Resilient Digital Nigeria

• Assessing implementation progress of the NCPS 2021 and Cybercrimes Act 2024 against stated objectives
• Examining the coordinating roles of NITDA, ngCERT, and ONSA in building a whole-of-nation cyber defence posture
• Benchmarking national progress against the ITU Global Cybersecurity Index and continental peers

Africa's Cyber Frontline: Threat Vectors, Policy Gaps, and the Intelligence Imperative

• Mapping dominant attack vectors across the continent — BEC, ransomware, SIM swap, and state-sponsored intrusions
• Assessing the AU Convention on Cyber Security — progress made, gaps remaining, and enforcement realities
• Exploring shared threat intelligence frameworks through AFRIPOL, INTERPOL Africa, and regional SOC collaboration

AI-Powered Threat Detection: Moving from Pilots to Production-Grade Defence

• Understanding why AI security deployments stall — fragmented data, weak governance, and absent audit trails
• Enabling real-time behavioural analytics and anomaly detection at enterprise scale
• Transitioning security operations from reactive incident response to predictive threat hunting

Zero Trust in Practice: Rearchitecting Security for Hybrid and Cloud Environments

• Examining why perimeter-based models are failing African enterprises at scale
• Implementing identity-first Zero Trust security in resource-constrained environments
• Identifying viable migration paths for legacy infrastructure without operational disruption

The CISO Mandate: Cyber Resilience, Board Accountability, and Cross-Sector Collaboration

• Addressing the challenge of building and retaining cybersecurity talent in a competitive, skills-scarce market
• Translating cyber risk into board-level language — aligning metrics, materiality, and accountability
• Evaluating cross-sector intelligence sharing models — what is working and what remains aspirational

Digital Identity at Scale: Trust, Biometrics, and the Security of e-Government Infrastructure

• Evaluating national identity systems as the foundation for digital trust — progress achieved and gaps remaining
• Detecting and mitigating biometric authentication threats — deepfakes, liveness spoofing, and presentation attacks
• Exploring decentralised and self-sovereign identity models gaining traction across African markets

Digital Fraud and Financial Crime: Detection, Attribution, and Disruption at Scale

• Identifying the most damaging attack vectors in 2025-26 — BEC, account takeover, and mobile money fraud
• Deploying GenAI-powered fraud detection and real-time transaction monitoring in high-volume environments
• Addressing attribution challenges and cross-border takedown coordination in West African cybercrime cases

Critical Infrastructure Protection: OT/IT Convergence and the Expanding Attack Surface

• Assessing growing exposure as industrial control systems connect to enterprise and cloud networks
• Understanding how threat actors target power grids, oil & gas operations, and telecom backbone infrastructure
• Establishing public-private coordination models for sustained national infrastructure protection

Regulated, Resilient, Ready: Navigating Cyber Compliance in a Maturing Policy Environment

• Navigating Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023 obligations and tracking enforcement trends
• Aligning CBN, SEC, and NCC cyber directives across sectoral requirements without duplicating effort
• Managing data sovereignty, residency mandates, and the complexity of cross-border data flows

Cloud Security and Risk Governance: Closing the Gaps as Adoption Accelerates

• Identifying top misconfigurations responsible for cloud breaches in African enterprise environments
• Defining shared responsibility boundaries — what cloud providers cover and what organisations must own
• Evaluating CSPM, CWPP, and CIEM tools against African enterprise realities and budget constraints

Ransomware and APTs: Incident Response Lessons from Africa's Frontlines

• Analysing the anatomy of ransomware campaigns targeting African public institutions and private enterprises
• Profiling APT groups active in West Africa — TTPs, attribution complexity, and geopolitical dimensions
• Assessing cyber insurance availability, pricing gaps, and coverage realities in the African market

Supply Chain and Third-Party Risk: The Blind Spot in Enterprise Cyber Defence

• Tracing how threat actors exploit vendor and partner access to breach larger, well-defended targets
• Strengthening software supply chain integrity through SBOMs, code signing, and dependency management
• Enforcing contractual and operational controls for sustained vendor cyber risk oversight

Generative AI, Unfiltered: The Threats, the Tools, and the Rules That Must Follow

• Examining AI-generated phishing, deepfake social engineering, and automated malware development in the wild
• Applying LLMs to threat intelligence synthesis, log analysis, and SOC automation on the defender side
• Establishing AI governance and responsible use policies inside security operations environments

SOC Maturity and Threat Intelligence: Scaling Security Operations Across African Enterprises

• Comparing in-house, outsourced, and hybrid MSSP models across different organisational growth stages
• Contextualising global threat intelligence feeds for the African threat environment
• Optimising SIEM deployments to reduce alert fatigue and improve mean time to detect and respond

Closing the Skills Gap: Cyber Talent Development and Workforce Strategy Across Africa

• Quantifying the cybersecurity workforce shortage across West Africa and addressing its structural causes
• Scaling university partnerships, apprenticeships, and women-in-cyber initiatives to broaden the talent pipeline
• Mobilising government programmes and private sector investment to sustain long-term workforce growth

Future Horizons: Quantum Threats, 5G Security, and Africa's Cyber Defence Roadmap to 2030

• Preparing for post-quantum cryptography — defining migration timelines and prioritisation frameworks
• Assessing new attack surfaces emerging from 5G network rollout across critical infrastructure
• Defining strategic priorities to shape the continent’s collective cyber defence posture through 2030

CYFRICA AWARDS & GALA EVENING