One cyber attack every 8 minutes. That is the headline from Africa's Digital Defense Race, the whitepaper Mastercard published yesterday. Its Cyber Insights platform recorded 69,236 observed cyber events against African organisations in 2025, and attacks on the continent have grown 421 percent since 2016 against 307 percent globally. I have gone through it with a Kenyan and East African lens, and six things stand out for me: 1/ Kenya is Africa's fifth most targeted market, with 7.1 percent of all observed events, behind Nigeria, South Africa, Morocco and Egypt. 2/ Kenya's monthly average was 408 events. In September 2025 it recorded 2,109. More than four in ten of the year's events landed in one month, and the white paper does not say why. 3/ A separate Check Point report puts the average Kenyan organization at 3,758 attack attempts a week, almost double the global average of 1,963. 4/ Mastercard calls mobile money "national infrastructure" in Kenya. 54 million active mobile money subscriptions on a handful of platforms means that concentration is both our efficiency and our exposure. 5/ Kenya, Rwanda and Tanzania sit in the top tier of the ITU Global Cybersecurity Index. Having the laws is not the same as having the capacity. Africa is short of roughly 200,000 cyber security professionals. 6/ Mastercard's new Africa Cybersecurity Center of Excellence starts in South Africa and Nigeria. Kenya is not in the first phase. When does Kenya get its turn? This is a vendor's white paper and should be read as one, but the data is valuable and the conclusion is hard to argue with. Kenya proved a phone could be a bank. The next decade is about proving that bank can be trusted every time. Full analysis is on my blog: moseskemibaro.com/2026/10/13… Where do you think Kenya's biggest cyber exposure sits today: the platforms, the SMEs or the skills? #Kenya #EastAfrica #Africa #CyberSecurity #CyberThreats #CyberResilence #Technology #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Mastercard #MobileMoney #Fintech @MastercardSSA – at Ngong, Kenya