Cybersecurity Baseline for Ghanaian SMEs in 2026
Ten controls every SME should have before scaling ads, payments, or customer data — mapped to how attackers actually target Ghanaian businesses.
The title is a list, so here is the list. These ten controls are the baseline before a Ghana SME spends on ads, stores customer records, or takes Mobile Money. Tools come after the list is true.
The ten controls
Do these in order. The first four stop the incidents we see most often: a stolen mailbox, an open admin panel, and a backup nobody has restored.
- MFA on email and on every admin account, including the host and the domain registrar.
- A password manager, so staff stop reusing the same password on mail and the website.
- The public site and its dependencies patched, with critical fixes inside 30 days.
- A backup you have restored once, not only a backup job that says it ran.
- Admin panels locked to named people. Remove freelancer access after launch.
- Payment webhooks verified, so a refresh cannot double-charge or mark an unpaid order as paid.
- A privacy notice that names the forms, Paystack if you use it, and the host.
- A one-page list of vendors who can see customer data: host, email, payments, analytics.
- An incident card: who is called, how customers are told, where the backup lives.
- A short briefing for finance and HR on phishing, because that is where the payment fraud starts.
The next 90 days
Week one is MFA and the access list. The first month is the restore test and the patch pass. By day 90 the privacy notice matches the forms and finance can reconcile a test Mobile Money payment. That sequence is the programme. A slide deck is not.
If the site already takes payments, webhook verification outranks a new dashboard. ThinQ Shopping is an example of checkout that records Paystack and Mobile Money instead of hoping the customer closed the tab on a successful prompt.
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