According to the Economic and Financial Crimes (EFCC), Nigeria as a nation till date has lost over $500 million due to Cybercrime.
This will suggest that the loss as of today’s date is likely to be at least 20% higher as more sophisticated cybercrime tools are now available and because of the advancement in artificial intelligence, audio spoofing etc.
Cybercrime is criminal activity that either targets or uses a computer, a computer
network, or a networked device to gain access to finances or to steal or ransomware or to compromise sensitive data.
Cybercrime is also perpetuated to disrupt computer networks and blackmail an organisation into paying out agreed sums to get their network, for political or personal reasons and can be carried out by individuals or organizations.
As sophisticated as some western countries such as United States, Australia, Germany, France, UK etc with tools such as Firewalls, Endpoint Detection Systems, Zero Trust, 2-Factor authentication right now it still seems like a lost battle.
Traditional methods of protecting IT networks and data such as firewalls, zero trust and two-factor authentication based on authenticating twice on the same device, etc., are failing to provide the required protection for our digital assets or IT landscape.
Imagine if we undertook an exercise (with written permission) to conduct a security penetration test of most of the leading consumer software applications used daily by most of our society, I believe the findings would be very revealing.
Nigeria is now gradually becoming a victim country, however there are ways,
methods, and techniques to impede data theft & ransomware crimes and provide 100% security for all data as follows.
Three or 4 -Factor encryption of all data, files of any kind, (text, images & video)
at rest to include biometrics such as facial recognition or using your
fingerprint to unlock access viewing all sensitive data.
- Automatic back up of data at file or row data level, wherever the data resides
on a personal PC, in the cloud, on a server machine which now provides
100% recoverability. - Migrate or convert data held in spreadsheets to a secure encrypted database application.
- Using Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, Software Robotics and
Powerful Programming Languages to write customised software applications
that can proactively detect, defend, and attack cyber criminals in their stride.
Cybersecurity Ventures estimated “global cybercrime costs to grow by 15 percent per year over the next five years, reaching $10.5 trillion USD annually by 2025, up from $3 trillion USD in 2015.
Cyber Crime represents the greatest transfer of economic wealth in history, risks the incentives for innovation and its growth rate is exponentially larger than the damage inflicted from natural disasters in a single year, and will be more profitable than the global trade of all major illegal drugs combined.”
The above statistics are clearly very concerning, industry practitioners, cybersecurity product providers and practitioners certainly need to communicate more and collaborate on research and development to discover, invent and establish new products, services and techniques to combat cybercrime.
Current methods or complacency would result in many such new headliners, we
need to act fast and Nigeria as a nation is clearly no exception.
Valentine Waturuocha is the Chief Technology Officer/Founder of TEMSCONSU
(www.temsconsu.com) and is the inventor of Excelitte (www.excelitte.com – A Cyber Security Toolset that has all the features mentioned in the article), PMPplanner – (www.pmpplanner.com –
A Project Management Toolset that has features than none other has), Omnium Lite –
(www.temscorp.com – A DevOps TEM Toolset).
Valentine started his career over 25 years ago after completing an MSC degree in City University London,
with a focused practical dissertation in Computer & Internet Security. Valentine also completed a mini-business studies program at Harvard University Boston in 2007 and is a member of the Harvard Business Review Group.
Valentine has either led or been involved at a decision-making level in successfully delivering a combined
value of over $300 million worth of project value to various organisations globally in the last 10 years or
so.
In the past 5 years he has also consulted or advised federal, state & local government depts in Australia, the
United States, EMEA regions, etc on Cybersecurity, DevOps, E-Government.
