Alan Mercer was at his desk in the regional capacity building bureau in Assosa, western Ethiopia, when a man burst into his office, distraught. Right at the end of a four-year master’s degree programme, he had lost the only copy of his thesis to a computer virus. Mercer, an IT trainer with Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), wasn’t surprised. "Show me an Ethiopian computer without a virus and I’d ask which foreigner it belongs to," he says.
While western countries have partially learned to neutralise the threat of computer viruses, Africa has become a hive of trojans, worms and exploiters of all stripes. As PC use on the continent has spread in the past decade (in Ethiopia it has gone from 0.01% of the Ethiopian population to 0.45% through 1999-2008), viruses have hitched a ride, wreaking havoc on development efforts, government programmes and fledgling businesses.
Infection rate
"It wouldn’t be unreasonable to say 80% of all computers you find in Africa will have some nastiness on them," says Tariq Khokhar, the chief development officer of Aptivate, a non-governmental organisation that focuses on IT. This compares to around 30% in the UK, according to Panda Security. The cost is hard to measure, but ask IT consultants and development workers about the impact, and the stories pour out. Mercer tells of an agriculture bureau employee who lost the multi-year plan for agricultural improvements for the Benishangul-Gumuz region, Ethiopia’s fourth poorest area. Jeremy Brown, an IT consultant in Cameroon, says that one client was operating with more than 200 infected files, drastically slowing down its PCs, corrupting confidential information and exposing it over the internet. Even the Congress of South African Trade Unions found in May that its website was spreading viruses to visitors. "Viruses are pretty endemic," says Brown. "All organisations and individuals are affected by them."
Brand-new PCs are often ridden with viruses from the start when vendors install pirated, infected copies of Windows – Khokhar estimates that around a third of pirated software is already infected. And even when antivirus software is installed, it is almost impossible to keep up to date. The daily update of new virus definitions from Symantec is around 40MB; McAfee’s is around 100MB. "On a 56Kb dialup link, we are talking all day to download," Mercer says. Sometimes the update file is removed and replaced by a newer one before the download has had time to complete.
"The entire national bandwidth for Ethiopia, I can simulate that in my house," Khokhar says. This keeps Ethiopia off the antivirus software provider Kaspersky’s annual list of the top 10 countries both originating and being targeted by viruses; in 2008, China led both categories. The Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy) would help Ethiopians download antivirus updates faster, but would also expose them to more attacks. "If you wanted a way to get [African countries] on to that top 10 list of countries affected by viruses, the first step is to install a big internet connection," Khokhar says.
Computer viruses are not the only reason Africa lags behind the west in IT development. Electricity supply, training, and bandwidth management issues make e-business a pipe dream in most places. But people are fighting back. Mercer does a day of antivirus and power-protection training as part of all his training courses, as do many people at VSO on an informal basis.