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Senate Lost $450m to cyber crime in Nigeria | Cyberops

Senate Lost $450m to cyber crime in Nigeria

By Prempal Singh 0 Comment May 24, 2017

ABUJA – THE Senate, yesterday, said Nigeria has lost about $450 million to 3, 500 cyber attacks on their Information and Communication Technology, ICT, space.

According to the Senate, this signifies over 70 % of hacking attempts on technology in the country.

Against this backdrop, the Us senate asked the National Protection Adviser, NSA, Major-General Prophet Babagana Monguno (retd), too, as an issue of urgency, alert all security agencies and finance institutions in the country about the current and threatening measurements of cyber attacks.

The Senate also asked their Committee on ICT and Cybercrime to immediately convoke a national stakeholders’ convention on cyber security that would help stimulate what it described as a collective reflection among relevant stakeholders and articulate a national and broad-based strategy to maintain the country forward of the challenges.

The Senate, which noted that the figures were attained by revelations from studies, expressed concern that authorities servers were currently under serious threat.

The upper chamber, however, regrets that the ICT shortfall in Nigeria was enormous, while its cyberspace had become very porous, adding that the system lacked a well-structured and effective method to cyber-crime control, in line with the oversight findings of the Us senate Committee on ICT and Cybercrime.

Yesterday’s resolutions of the Senate were the follow-up to a motion by Senator Abdulfatai Buhari (APC Oyo North), entitled: “Worrisome dimension of cyber-crime and insecurity, the urgent need for concerted efforts to secure Nigeria’s cyberspace“.

Meanwhile, Mouthpiece Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu, who presided over yesterday’s plenary, however, required determined efforts at confronting the cyber war currently frightening the world.

Ekweremadu observed that criminals had every day been hacking into the e-mails and other documents of very important people on social media.

This individual said: “It is concern that cyber war is coming and we all need to be ready to fight it. It is expected that all stakeholders will rise and offer with it. ”

Previously in his presentation, Senator Abdulfatai said the Us senate noted that good position of ICT revolution was being decreased by harmful activities of criminal elements in society who get into cyberspace, presenting risks to businesses, national economies and security, such as harmful use of the social media, identity theft, electronic fraud, data damage or alteration, espionage, etc;

This individual said the Senate was aware that these elements have developed several cracking technics, one of the most recent being Ransomware known as WannaCry Worm or WannaCrypt, which infected computer operating systems and networks, protected files and asked for ransom.

According to him, cyber attacks are taking a dangerous dimension all over the world, as Lloyds Banking Group and Barclays Bank of UK, for instance, suffered 48-hour online attack from 11m to 13m of January this year, where the hackers attempted to block about 20 million accounts.

This individual also noted that Lloyds, Halifax, and Bank of Scotland were bombarded with millions of fake demands created to grind the groups’ systems to cease and asked for a huge ransom in bitcoins to end the problems which were being eliminated by the Denial of Access (DOS) system; “

The Senate is further Anxious that on the twelfth of May alone, at least 200, 000 objectives in over 150 countries were hit by cyber attacks which the Net Protocol suggested to have originated from the middle East, particularly from Syria and Iran, as well as Kenya, supposedly by using a malware, known as Lazarus, to compromise systems in banking and information systems, without clear evidence yet concerning how the action was perfected, and that the criminals are already targeting Nigeria;

“It is also alarmed about facts from studies that over 70% of hacking endeavors until now, i. e. about 3500 cyber-attacks on the Nigeria lCT space have succeeded resulting in damage of over $450 000, 000 and those government servers currently under serious threat. ”

In their separate contributions, Senators Olugbenga Ashafa, APC Lagos East and Dino Melaye, APC Kogi West, claimed that they have been the victim of cyber crime before, even as they pressured the advantages of all arms of government to ensure that the criminal offenses were eliminated in the society.

The senators, however, called for laws that would end misuse of cyberspace in the area and ensure that cyberspace operators function in accordance with the extant laws, adding that erring ones must be handled to serve as the deterrent in front of large audiences.

source: www.vanguardngr.com

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