How to mitigate impact of cybercrime in Nigeria, by experts

Experts have recommended more proactive measures to mitigate the increasing menace of cybercrime in Nigeria.

While the country is said to be loosing about N127 billion yearly to the menace, globally Nigerians are said to be responsible for $9.3 billion share cost of the crime.

At the 2016 CyberXchange Conference in Lagos, with focus on securing the nation’s cyber assets, the experts stressed the need to have a stronger cyber gateway, which will filter processes in and out of the country’s cyberspace.

Besides, they posited that there was the need to deploy more innovative technology to manage information security in the country.

The two-day event, which ended yesterday, experts decried the continuous rise in cyber attacks, and equally called for increased awareness among Nigerians over the menace.

They submitted that most organisations seem to be either ignorant of the cyber threats in their business environment, or have turned deaf ears to implementing the full software solution that would detect and prevent cyber attacks faster.

While it has been established that it usually takes 146 days before successful breach is detected by affected organisation, the Chief Information Security Officer, Nigeria Stock Exchange (NSE), Favour Femi-Oyewole, said to successfully tackle cyber security related issues, organisations should focus on developing ‘human firewalls.’

She explained that most organisations focus on security solutions, but continue to fail, for sheer reason they rely on data that is gathered after an attack rather than stopping the attack from occurring in the first place.

Femi-Oyewole said that cyber security must be addressed proactively with next generation continuous endpoint monitoring in order to identify, respond, contain and recover rapidly from advanced attacks.

To guard against any vulnerability at the NSE, the Nigerian bourse introduced minimum operating (security) standards in 2014, “and the results positively impacting members of the NSE.”