After a few months during which South Africa’s operators have had a number of reported disagreements with each other or the South Africa regulator, MTN, Vodacom, Telkom, Cell C and Liquid Intelligent Technologies have now joined forces in a common cause: to take on criminals.
These communication giants have together established a non-profit organisation, the Communication Risk Information Centre (COMRiC).
COMRiC‘s main focus will be on identification, mitigation and prevention of the common risk issues within the communications industry. Not too surprisingly the key focus will be critical infrastructure network vandalism, commercial crimes and cyber security.
Theft and vandalism have been a major issue lately, affecting the main operators and causing disruption of communication services and large financial losses. For example, some operators have reportedly not found it viable to replace damaged base stations.
Hence the formation of COMRiC, which has enabled formal discussion and solution finding between operators to handle the risks they face and support the government in the overall fight against crime in South Africa.
This collaboration between the country’s operators to fight theft and network infrastructure vandalism has resulted in the establishment of the Critical Infrastructure Monitoring Operations Centre (CiMOC), which operates under the COMRiC structure.
The CiMOC will prioritise the collective monitoring of critical network infrastructure theft and vandalism across the combined network footprint of all the country’s operators.
This includes working closely with the police services to identify and apprehend suspects in network vandalism, store robberies, battery theft and fraudulent application scenarios, including commercial crimes.
