Kaspersky has spent over a decade building its African business. Its next phase is about winning a bigger role in the systems that keep the continent’s economy running.
Kaspersky, the Russian-founded global security company, said Africa is becoming a key market for the group. Its operations across Sub-Saharan Africa are now profitable, executives told TechCabal on the sidelines of GITEX Nigeria in Lagos in September.
The company plans to expand its business with banks, governments, and critical infrastructure operators as the growth of digital financial services creates more systems that need protection. Its African sales rose 12% in 2025, following 19% growth in 2024, according to its executives.
Nigeria is Kaspersky’s top priority market in Africa, according to its executives. Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, and Cameroon are also high priority; Kenya is rated “very high,” and Uganda and Zambia are growth markets.
The expansion would give Kaspersky a deeper role in institutions whose security failures can disrupt payments, expose customer information, and interrupt public services. The company said it helped build and continues to run Rwanda’s national security operations centre infrastructure. It also said several East African central banks use its products, and that Ethiopia contributes 60% of the region’s revenue.
Kaspersky wants a larger role in institutional customers’ operations by monitoring networks, investigating attacks, and supporting recovery. African institutions gain capabilities they may struggle to build themselves, but also become more dependent on its software and expertise. Choosing a security supplier means assessing both the protection it offers and the institution’s ability to oversee its work.
Kaspersky is trying to address those concerns through products customers can operate within their own environments and a transparency programme that allows scrutiny of its technology. The challenge is whether those arrangements give institutions enough control as the company takes on more sensitive work.
Moving beyond antivirus
Financial institutions account for much of Kaspersky’s private-sector business in Africa, said Bethwel Opil, its enterprise business sales manager. Government accounts are smaller but strategically important because they include regulators and institutions responsible for national systems.
The attraction of these customers extends beyond selling additional software licences. A supplier that monitors networks, investigates incidents and supports recovery becomes part of an institution’s daily operations. Its relationship with the customer can extend across several security functions.
Kaspersky’s global results show the commercial importance of that shift. Its sales reached $836 million in 2025, with business-to-business (B2B) sales rising 16% and enterprise sales growing 21%. Products protecting infrastructure beyond traditional computers and servers recorded 29% growth, compared with 1% for endpoint products.
Kaspersky’s push into African businesses has yet to produce the growth it is seeing among consumers. Consumer sales growth has averaged 36% in Africa, compared with 10% for business, Opil said. The company did not provide revenue totals for either segment, leaving the size of its institutional business unclear.
However, its case for selling broader protection across the continent rests on changes in how attacks have evolved. In 2025, the company said it detected about 500,000 malicious files daily across its customer base. Ransomware attackers can steal information before locking a customer’s files, then threaten to publish it even if the organisation has backups that allow it to restore its systems. Restoring operations leaves the risk of a data leak unresolved.
Staff using public AI tools add another route for data to leave. Employees who paste sensitive documents into chatbots to summarise or polish them can expose corporate data, Kaspersky said. It said its tools can show organisations which unsanctioned AI tools their staff use, so they can set rules and risk controls.
Institutions need to know how attackers broke in, which systems and data they accessed, and whether they can still get in. Kaspersky’s tools collect and analyse logs, the records of activity kept by computers, email systems and networks, to help security teams trace the attack.
Moses Munguti, a security consultant and Kaspersky Africa lead, said customers have different budgets, staffing levels and security capabilities. Combining several functions in one product can help smaller teams manage that work, giving Kaspersky a way to expand its role within the organisations it already protects.
The benefit is a more coordinated defence. The trade-off is greater dependence on the supplier. The more security functions an institution buys from Kaspersky, the harder it could become to switch providers. Leaving may mean replacing several tools at once and retraining the staff who use them.
Kaspersky is competing for that role with companies such as Sophos and Microsoft. Sophos completed its $859 million acquisition of Secureworks in February 2025, expanding its threat detection, investigation, and response capabilities. The combined company said it served more than 28,000 organisations through managed detection and response services, which provide security specialists to monitor and help contain attacks.
The competition already extends into Africa. Johannesburg-based BUI offers a security operations service built on Microsoft Sentinel, providing monitoring, threat detection, and investigation across South Africa and other African markets, according to a Microsoft case study. Kaspersky must compete with both rival software platforms and service providers using those platforms to manage customers’ security.
Local deployment does not settle control
Kaspersky faces additional scrutiny because of its Russian origins. In June 2024, the US Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) restricted the export of its cybersecurity software, citing risks stemming from potential Russian government influence and the software’s access to customers’ systems. Kaspersky disputed the decision, attributed it to geopolitical and theoretical concerns, and denied that it threatened US national security.
Kaspersky subsequently announced it would wind down its US operations from July 20, 2024, and eliminate US-based jobs. The restrictions also prohibited antivirus software and software updates for US customers as of September 29, 2024.
While the restrictions do not establish that Kaspersky compromised African customers, they highlight a risk institutions must assess when choosing security software: the supplier’s access to their systems and the laws under which it operates.
These concerns extend beyond Kaspersky. In its 2026 Africa Cybersecurity Threat Outlook, consulting firm EY identified third-party and ecosystem risk as a major blind spot, noting that vulnerabilities can spread through vendors and their suppliers. An institution can strengthen its own defences and remain exposed through a company it relies on.
This complicates Africa’s push for digital sovereignty. Keeping data within national borders addresses where it is stored. Institutions must also establish who can access it, control the software that handles it, and maintain the systems that support it.
Kaspersky said customers can run its security products on their own premises, giving their IT teams greater control over the infrastructure.
“Based on the functionality of the product or service our customers want to use, in most cases they can choose if and how much data they want to provide,” Munguti told TechCabal. “Kaspersky products never process sensitive personal data. We just need a unique identifier to check against our cloud-based database. That can give our customers confidence that there’s no likelihood of [data] leaving the environment.”
Some detection runs locally, allowing devices to identify threats without constant Internet connectivity, he said. Other checks use Kaspersky’s cloud-based threat intelligence. Customers need to understand which functions operate locally, what information is transmitted, and how their chosen settings affect protection, according to Munguti.
In 2023, the company opened a Transparency Centre in Kigali, Rwanda—one of 13 such centres globally and the only one in Africa—offering customers and regulators information on its engineering and data-processing practices, including source-code review demonstrations.
These measures give institutions ways to scrutinise Kaspersky’s assurances. Using them requires expertise to assess the software and verify how it operates within their own systems. Customers buying security tools to compensate for limited technical capacity may also need help evaluating those tools.
Kaspersky’s expansion could strengthen those institutions’ defences. The risk is that they become better protected without becoming better equipped to oversee the supplier. As the company takes on more sensitive assignments, customers need both: protection against attackers and enough control to maintain that protection if the relationship ends.
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