Nigeria records 3,500 cyber attacks in last one year

ABUJA— Nigeria has experienced 3,500
cyber attacks within the last one year,
with over 70 per cent success rate and a
loss of $450 million, Acting Director
General of the National Information
Technology Development Agency,
NITDA, Dr. Vincent Olatunji, has said.

Olatunji said this during a capability and
capacity building training workshop
organized by NITDA in partnership with
its Malaysian counterpart, Malaysia
Cyber Security Agency, in Abuja,
yesterday.
Similarly, an IT consultant, Abdul-
Hakeem Ajibola, said 0.80 per cent of
Nigeria's Gross Domestic Product, GDP,
equivalent to the cement sector, was lost
to cybercrime.
According to th NITD boss, the country's
GDP lost $568.51 billion in 2014, which
amounts to annual loss of $450 million,
an equivalent of N89.55 billion annual
direct loss to the Nigerian economy, at
the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN,
exchange rate of N199 to $1.
With the increasing penetration of
technology into the economy and
continuous loss to cybercriminals, he
advised that measures must be put in
place to mitigate the capacity of
cybercriminals from taking advantage of
the environment.
The NITDA boss, who lamented the
outrageous rate of attacks in Nigeria,
said the Federal Government had a lot of
work to do to checkmate further attacks
of public and private facilities.
He said: "We are preparing people to
prepare against cybercrime, private and
public sectors, within the last one year.
So, there is a lot of work to do.
"The high rate of attacks in Nigeria
shows that we need to work harder to
ward off these attackers to ensure that
we prevent such attacks and even where
they take place, we ensure they are
countered."
He stated that Nigeria, like any other
country, was facing many challenges
from network design, security
prevention as well as cyber-attack to
cybercrimes, saying the need for
effective security measures to create
trust and confidence in the various
platforms could not be over-emphasised.
Olatunji further explained that the
workshop was in fulfilment of NITDA's
mandate, particularly in the area of
fostering the development and growth of
information technology for sustainable
socio-economic development in Nigeria.
He said the commitment of the Federal
Government to effective ICT
development in various sectors of the
economy had led to the creation of
requisite enabling environment for
stakeholders to contribute to the level of
ICT development in the country.
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