President Yoweri Museveni hours ago received his counter-part President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea who arrived in the country this afternoon on a three day official visit.

President Mbasogo’s visit comes shortly after United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) welcomed Equatorial Guinea’s accession to the Kampala Convention on internally displaced people (IDPs), becoming the 29th African Union (AU) member state to do so according to the UNHCR.

The Kampala Convention is the world’s first and only regional legally binding instrument for the protection and assistance of IDPs, who often face heightened risks, violations and sexual violence because of their displacement, while they struggle to access their rights and basic protection.

Equatorial Guinea deposited its instrument of ratification of the Kampala Convention at the AU headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in October this year. With this development, 29 of the AU’s 55 member states have now acceded to the Kampala Convention.

The move by Equatorial Guinea is particularly opportune as the Kampala Convention is marking its 10th anniversary this year with activities organized by the AU with support from UNHCR and other partners.

President Mbasogo who is the official AU champion of 2019 on finding solutions to forced displacement in Africa and will represent the AU at the Global Refugee Forum in Geneva had a tete-a-tete meeting with President Yoweri Museveni.

Tomorrow he will tour Kiryandongo Refugee Settlement center, Panyandoli Health Centre 111 and Panyandoli vocation school to have a first hand experience on how Uganda has successfully handled the refugee situation.

Over one million refugees have fled to Uganda in the last two and a half years, making Uganda the third largest refugee-hosting country in the world after Turkey and Pakistan1 , with 1.36 million refugees by June 2018.

Wars, violence and persecution in the Horn of Africa and Great Lakes Region were the main drivers of forced displacement into Uganda, led by South Sudan’s conflict, insecurity and ethnic violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and political instability and human rights violations in Burundi.

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In 2019, the number of unique malicious objects detected by Kaspersky’s web antivirus solution rose by an eighth, compared to last year — reaching 24,610,126. This growth was mainly influenced by a 187% rise in web skimmer files. Other threats, such as backdoors and banking Trojans detected in-lab, also grew, while the presence of miners dropped by more than a half. These trends have demonstrated a shift in the type of threats used by attackers on the web who search for more effective ways to target users, according to the Kaspersky Security Bulletin: Statistics of the Year report.

In 2018, unique malicious objects (including scripts, exploits and executable files) detected by Kaspersky’s web antivirus solution totaled 21,643,946, rising to 24,610,126 this year. The growth accounts for an increase in the number and variety of HTML pages and scripts with hidden data loading – usually used by unscrupulous advertisers. Yet, most notably, the growth was also partially caused by online skimmers (sometimes referred to as sniffers) – where scripts are embedded by attackers in online stores and used to steal users’ credit card data from websites.

The growth of online skimmers’ unique files (scripts and HTML) detected by Kaspersky web antivirus equaled 187%, reaching 510,000. At the same time the number of threats detected by web antivirus have risen five-fold (by 523%), totaling 2,660,000 in 2019. Web skimmers also entered the top 20 malicious objects detected online, taking 10th place in the overall ranking. The share of new Backdoors and banking Trojan files, among all types of threats detected in-lab, also grew by 134% and 61% to reach 7,644,402 and 739,551 respectively.

Nevertheless, the number of unique malicious URLs detected by Kaspersky web antivirus halved in comparison to 2018 (50.5%) – from 554,159,621 to 273,782,113. This shift was largely caused by significant decrease of hidden web miners, even though several detections related to them (including Trojan.Script.Miner.gen, Trojan.BAT.Miner.gen, Trojan.JS.Miner.m), can still be seen in the top 20 web malware threats.

The presence of programs that secretly generate cryptocurrency on users’ computers (called ‘local’ miners) has also been steadily declining over the year: the number of users’ computers affected by attempts to install miners dropped by 59%, from 5,638,828 to 2,259,038.

85% of web threats were detected as malicious URL – this detection name is used to identify links from Kaspersky’s black list. It includes links to web pages containing redirects to exploits, sites with exploits and other malicious programs, botnet command and control centers, extortion websites, and others.

“The volume of online attacks has been growing for years, but in 2019 we saw a clear shift from certain types of attacks that are becoming ineffective, to the ones focused on gaining clear profit from users. This is partly due to users becoming more aware of the threats and how to avoid them, and organisations steadily becoming more responsible. A good example is miners, which have lost their popularity due to lower profitability and cryptocurrencies’ fight against covert mining. This year we also witnessed growth in zero-day exploits, showing products remain vulnerable and are used by attackers for sophisticated attacks, and this trend is likely to continue in the future,” says Vyacheslav Zakorzhevsky, Head of Anti-Malware Research at Kaspersky.

The number of new malicious files processed by Kaspersky’s in-lab detection technologies amounted to 342,102 – which is 1.05% less than the previous year.

Read more about annual threat statistics on Securelist.com.

In order to stay protected, Kaspersky recommends the following:

Pay close attention to and don’t open any suspicious files or attachments received from unknown sources

Do not download and install applications from untrusted sources

Do not click on any links received from unknown sources and suspicious online advertisements

Create strong passwords and don’t forget to change them regularly

Always install updates. Some of them may contain critical security issues fixes

Ignore messages asking to disable security systems for office software or antivirus software

Use a robust security solution appropriate to your system type and devices, such as Kaspersky Internet Security or Kaspersky Security

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