A cyber security expert, Mr Victor Idonor on Wednesday chided government institutions for allegedly politicising issues relating to cyber security.

Idonor, the Director Cyber Security Challenge Nigeria (CYSEC NG) expressed his displeasure in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on the sidelines of the ongoing 3rd Annual Conference and Hackathon challenge in Abuja.

The theme of the conference is “Forensics and Defense against Next-Generation Cyber Fraud”.

The cyber expert said that issues of cyber security was fast becoming a global concern, adding that Nigerian youths were engaging seriously in cyber fraud.

“Cyber fraud is a serious issue to nations of the world and our government needs to know that people engaging in cyber fraud are skilled and experts.

“With the dynamics of cyber fraud going on globally and in Nigeria, if the government does not engage these youths positively, it will overwhelm us in the near future.

“It is sad to say that when we hosted the Cyber Security conference in Lagos, the government institutions attended the conference from Abuja or even sent their delegates.

“We went out of our way to balance the cyber security education and brought it down to Abuja and to our disappointment, most of our targeted government institutions did not show up.

“The government institutions are meant to support this programme because they are saddled with the responsibility of cyber space regulation, crimes investigation and all these require forensics and digitisation.

“Officials from the government institutions did not show up at the conference because they will not get ‘subventions’, Idonor said.

He said that it was a wrong approach to issues of national interest, adding that the well being of the citizens was supposed to supersede personal interests.

Idonor said that the country had skilled cyber experts whose skills could be harnessed to curb internet fraud.

He said that the conference was organised to identify cyber experts and accord them the training they needed to positively impact on the sector in the country.

Highlights of the event include hacking competition consisting of password cracking, code breaking, web security, reverse engineering, cryptography, penetration testing, binary exploitation, and forensic,  among others. (NAN)

– Oct. 31, 2018 @ 13:15 GMT |