Protecting South African companies against cybercrime: a critical analysis of the directors? duty of care in relation to cybersecurity and the use of artificial intelligence to protect companies? online meetings

South Africa (SA) has one of the highest rates of cybercrime in the world and SA companies' cyberassets are vulnerable to cyberattacks. Since SA companies' online meetings (OMs) are conducted on an online platform and use online databases that contain sensitive Personally Identifiable Information (PII), they are particularly prone to cyberattacks. Artificial Intelligence (Al) could however be used to resist cyberattacks on a company's cyberassets, such as its online platform and its online databases. Contrariwise, AI could be used by cybercriminals to instigate cyberattacks. This thesis will critically analyse how a more detailed treatment of the directors' duty of care in relation to cybersecurity can help to make SA companies more cyberresilient, with the specific focus on their OMs, as well as the role that the use of AI can play in this regard, and how it should be regulated? Where other researchers looked at OMs as a means to enhance corporate governance and corporate social responsibility (CSR), they have failed to look at the dangers that cybercrime present to OMs and that directors may be held personally liable in the event that a company's cybersecurity was inadequate to thwart a cyberattack and the company's cyberassets were compromised. By means of legal comparison, this thesis critically analyses how directors need to exercise their duty of care in relation to cybersecurity in order to help make SA companies more cyberresilient, and will argue for directors' use of Al as a tool to help resist cybercrime, and its regulation. This thesis mounts the challenge of SA cybercrime by firstly looking at how OMs and the duty of care in relation to cybersecurity are regulated in different jurisdictions, and how corporate governance and CSR should include AI, while it also looks at directors' exposure to liability in terms of the use and regulation of AI. It is submitted that the SA Cybercrimes Act 19 of 2020 and the King Code should be updated to include the use of Al, since it is an important tool for directors in the fight against cybercrime.

Grantor

Department of Commercial Law

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Kritzinger, Julian

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Idensohn, Kathleen

• Commercial Law

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/11427/39681

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/39681