ADEBAYO Shittu, minister of communications, is worried that insecurity in cyberspace has continued to pose serious challenge for the government in spite of efforts made to address the issue. Shittu, who spoke at the Nigeria ICT Impact CEO Forum 2017 in Lagos, expressed fears that cyber attacks, if not tamed, could erode the gains of global technology advancement.

He said cyber security is more than a challenge for government as it poses a huge obstacle to digital transformation and digital Nigeria agenda. He noted that the federal government has estimated an annual loss of over N127 billion to cybercrime activities across the nation.

According to Shittu, Nigeria had its fair share of cybercrimes between 2016 and 2017. He said that the economic recession in 2016 brought about numerous attacks targeted at organisations and individuals. The most recent was the unsuspecting patronisers of ponzi schemes. “In the wave of austerity, many people lost money to the said schemes and others fell victims to malicious and compromising websites, and this must not be allowed to continue.”

He explained that in 2013, the ministry set a five-year National Broadband Plan target of reaching a five-fold increase in broadband penetration by the end of 2018, which according to him, by all indications, would be met and surpassed given the enthusiasm of the present administration.

The broadband access is a platform through which people could be connected to the internet to participate in a variety of online businesses like e-commerce although cybercriminals also catch up with the opportunity to hack into database of organisations with the intention to gain unauthorised access to vital information of organisations and individuals just to defraud such persons and organisations.

However, Shittu said that government would not be deterred in protecting Nigeria’s cyber territorial zones to make them safe for business. Listing government’s efforts to address cyber insecurity in the country, Shittu said in 2015, the federal government passed the National cyber security into law which provides directives to guide, regulate and protect the use and deployment of critical information infrastructure in the Nation. The bill describes classes of cybercrime and also includes robust clauses for criminal prosecution following cyber security crimes, he said.

– Sept. 1, 2017 @ 10:11 GMT /