East African Cybersecurity: Improving Microfinance Database in Ethiopia

Abstract

ICT has become an essential factor in Ethiopia and other East African countries to transform their economies. Meanwhile, the agriculture sector is still the primary driver of economic development. The difference between the past and present years is the injection of technology to further drive this business. For Ethiopia, this means using a database to support countrywide micro-financing to farmers in seeking capital for leasing land, purchasing needed materials, and hiring workers. The objectives of this chapter were to redesign and harden the database architecture of the researched micro-financing organization. The researchers performed an assessment of the organization's information systems. After identifying weaknesses, they followed controls identified in the NIST SP 800-53. This chapter describes the security faults within the database, showing the lack of baseline cybersecurity controls to ensure a hardened system. The authors proposed a security-centered database architecture after auditing the researched organization's IT infrastructure and information systems.