In the wake of increasing Cyber Security Threats in world, the South African Youth in possession of advanced online experience and expertise, need a platform to collaborate and contribute towards a cyber secure South Africa. Poor cyber security is increasingly affecting all levels of society, national, local and personal. With a few strokes of a keyboard, nation states, terrorist groups, stateless organizations, and rogue individuals can launch a cyber-attack from anywhere, at any time, disrupting and damaging our democracy and way of life.
These cyber criminals are patient, they will not attack now and when they do it will be too late for us to act. The South African Youth sees the warning lights and need to have their own dialogue on this discourse. Recently, the Department of Telecommunications and Postal Services established Child Online Protection Programmes with efforts to bring awareness of cyber security. We believe that there must be a massive roll-out of such programmes. Synergy between academic institutions, government and corporate will bring about innovative and sustainable solutions.
Cyber M8 is a Cyber Security capacity development youth programme in collaboration with local municipalities and enterprise development agencies with a roll-out across all nine (9) provinces to deal with the practicality of using the digital marketing tools and increasing cyber security awareness.