Minister of Communications, AbdurRaheem Adebayo Shittu has raised the red fl ag on the debilitating threat that cybersecurity poses to the corporate existence of Nigeria.
He raised this concern at the Nigeria ICT Impact CEO Forum 2017 organised by ICT Watch Network on the theme “Broadband Ac c e s s : T h e C h a l l e n g e s o f Cybersecurity Th reat and Eff ect of Social Media Era.
” “Cybersecurity is more than a challenge for government as it poses a huge obstacle to our digital transformation/Digital Nigeria agenda in social and economy desired for the country.
Th e federal government has estimated an annual loss of over N 127 billion to cybercrime activities in the Nation,” he said.
CEO MTN Nigeria, Ferdi Moolman concurred with Shittu that the challenges of cybersecurity is huge and should not be handled with levity.
Making reference to the CTO Layer 7 Technologies, Adam Vincent, he said, “The threat is advancing quicker than we can keep up with it. Th e threat changes faster than our idea of the risk.
It’s no longer possible to write a large white paper about the risk to a particular system.
You would be rewriting the white paper constantly…” W h i l e p o i n t i n g o u t t h a t cybersecurity has become a top n a t i o n a l c o n c e r n f o r m o s t Governments round the world, he stressed that the disquiet has been due to the unprecedented rise in the number of cyber-attacks and campaigns recorded globally “with North Korea being one of the topmost instigators of the cyber war fare”.
According to him, the inevitable reality of today’s global digital interconnection arising from the increasing dependency on technology and the cyberspace for daily businesses, has made the world pervasively insecure.
“Year after year, thousands of cybersecurity problems are identifi ed in cyber space, and technologies from known and unknown global actors leaving us vulnerable,” he said.
He noted that since the beginning of 2017, there have been an inordinate number of cybersecurity meltdowns.
“Th ese attacks range from corporate breaches to viral, state-sponsored ransomware, leaks of spy tools, and full-on campaign hacking.
Citing the specific threats posed by the Lazarus Group, he said that this has been using DeltaCharlie to target “media, aerospace, financial, and critical infrastructure sectors in the United States and globally.
” Th e alert also highlighted technical details about hacking tools which “cyber actors” have used to target Critical Infrastructure both in private and public sectors in the United States and Globally.
Shittu said that Nigeria has had its fair share of cybercrimes between 2016 and 2017 alone, adding that the most recent targets were the unsuspecting patronizers of ponzi schemes.
According to him, “each year we see more services migrating to the cyber world within Government and private industry, whilst this means better and more convenient services and a boost in the economy, it also creates a viable avenue for cyber-attacks and criminal activities which could cripple or destabilize the National system”
