Kaspersky and AFRIPOL Train 40 African Law Enforcement Officers in Cybercrime Detection

Officers from 23 countries receive advanced threat hunting and security operations training as African cybercrime threats grow in scale and complexity

Kaspersky and AFRIPOL have completed a major cybersecurity capacity building programme for African law enforcement, training approximately 40 officers from 23 countries between November 2025 and March 2026 in Security Operations Center activities and advanced threat hunting techniques.

The training, delivered under a five-year cooperation agreement signed between Kaspersky and AFRIPOL in 2024, reflects growing recognition that combating sophisticated digital crime across the continent requires law enforcement agencies to develop deep technical expertise — not just investigative instinct.

What Officers Learned

The programme covered the fundamentals of modern cyber defence, equipping participants with practical skills in identifying malicious activity across Windows and Linux environments, analysing attacker tactics, techniques, and procedures, and using threat intelligence to detect and respond to advanced threats. A series of online question-and-answer sessions with Kaspersky’s Security Services experts allowed participants to work through complex scenarios and real-world cases, reinforcing classroom learning with direct practitioner insight.

Countries represented in the training included Algeria, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and eleven others spanning North, East, West, Central, and Southern Africa.

Why the Partnership Matters

Both organisations were candid about the scale of the challenge driving the initiative. Yuliya Shlychkova, Vice President of Public Affairs at Kaspersky, described cybercrime as borderless, sophisticated, and constantly evolving — a threat that no single organisation can address in isolation. She framed private-sector knowledge sharing with law enforcement as essential rather than optional.

Dr. Mohammed Benaired, Head of the Training and Capacity Building Division at AFRIPOL, echoed that assessment, stressing that equipping officers with practical skills in digital evidence analysis and incident response is critical to keeping pace with the growing complexity of cybercrime across the continent.

A Growing Training Footprint

The AFRIPOL programme forms part of Kaspersky’s broader expert training portfolio, which has reached more than 3,000 specialists from 50 countries since its launch. The company offers 12 educational courses spanning reverse engineering, threat hunting, incident response, and related disciplines — each calibrated to different levels of practitioner experience.

For AFRIPOL, which coordinates police cooperation across all 55 African Union member states, the partnership with Kaspersky represents a concrete step toward building a unified and technically capable regional response to cybercrime — one of the most rapidly growing security threats facing African governments, businesses, and citizens alike.