Cyber Insight, in partnership with Sophos, hosted an exclusive security briefing at Eikenhof Estate. IT managers, customers and channel partners attended. The event examined Sophos’s latest ransomware research and the vendor’s product roadmap.
Event summary
Cyber Insight framed the session as a strategic briefing for organisations in South Africa and the broader African market. Sophos presenters summarised findings from the vendor’s State of Ransomware 2025 research. Speakers described how ransomware has evolved, discussed recent tooling that undermines endpoint defences, and set out defensive priorities for the year ahead. The session combined local case perspectives with global data to help regional decision-makers plan risk reduction.
What Sophos’s 2025 research shows
Sophos’s State of Ransomware 2025 draws on responses from thousands of IT and security professionals. The report highlights several persistent and emerging trends:
- Exploited vulnerabilities remain a leading technical root cause of incidents. Organisations with unpatched software and weak configuration controls continue to be prime targets.
- Attackers pair encryption with data theft and extortion, increasing pressure on victims to negotiate. The theft-plus-encrypt pattern raises legal and reputational exposure.
- New attacker tooling is targeting and tampering with endpoint and EDR products. Sophos and industry outlets have warned of tools that disable or evade commercial defences, raising the bar for detection and response.
Key messages from the briefing
- Assume compromise, plan recovery. Teams should treat prevention and resilience as joint priorities. The session emphasised tested recovery plans and immutable backups.
- Fix the basics at scale. Patch management, strong access controls and multifactor authentication remain the highest-value investments to reduce initial access.
- Protect the security stack. Organisations must enable tamper protection, enforce least privilege, and monitor for attempts to disable or bypass endpoint defences. Sophos presenters stressed configuration hygiene for EDR/XDR agents.
- Human factors matter. Staffing shortages and skills gaps increase operational risk. The research confirms that lacking expertise and unclear responsibilities make incidents harder to detect and resolve.
Implications for African organisations
The trends Sophos described have concrete consequences for CIOs and CISOs on the continent:
- Many African enterprises run mixed legacy estates and cloud services. That mix can widen the window for exploited vulnerabilities unless patching and visibility improve.
- Insurance and regulatory frameworks vary across countries. Organisations must assume that paying a ransom does not remove legal exposure from data theft. The dual threat of encryption plus exfiltration amplifies compliance risk.
- Skills scarcity means partners and managed security providers play an outsized role. Events like the Cyber Insight briefing underline the value of channel partnerships for rapid capability uplift.
Practical recommendations from the event
- Prioritise patching for internet-facing systems and critical internal services. Use risk scoring to drive remediation.
- Enable tamper protection and role-based controls on endpoint and server agents. Regularly validate these protections.
- Test backups under realistic recovery scenarios. Offline or air-gapped copies reduce the chance that backups are compromised.
- Invest in detection and response workflows, including logging, threat hunting and runbooks that reflect regional constraints. Where talent is scarce, consider managed EDR/XDR and on-call incident services.
What to watch next
Sophos’s research and the Cyber Insight briefing underline one clear fact: ransomware remains adaptive. Attackers refine tools and techniques that erode traditional defensive assumptions. Organisations across Africa must couple prevention with tested resilience measures. Events like the one hosted by Cyber Insight and Sophos help translate global findings into regional action. Decision-makers should treat the Sophos 2025 findings as a call to shore up basics, harden security tooling, and validate recovery capabilities.
