Thursday, 28th March 2024
To guardian.ng
Search

‘N89.55b lost yearly to cyber crime in Nigeria’

By Nkeci Onyedika-Ugoeze
31 March 2016   |   7:38 am
An Information Technology (IT) expert, Abdul-Hakeem Ajijola who disclosed this yesterday at the Public Sector Cyber Security Hands Capacity Building Workshop organized by...

cyber-attack

An Information Technology (IT) expert, Abdul-Hakeem Ajijola who disclosed this yesterday at the Public Sector Cyber Security Hands Capacity Building Workshop organized by the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA)in Abuja that about N89.5 billion is lost yearly to cyber crime in Nigeria.

He noted that as technology becomes increasingly pervasive an dependency on it grows, economic losses will grow exponentially unless pre-emptive measures are taken to mitigate and eliminate the capacity of cybercriminals to take advantage of our environment.

According to him, “This does not preclude major disruptions by cyber criminals to critical national infrastructure like, Oil & Gas; Telecommunications; Banking & Finance, National Security & Government.

He said, “ June 2014 report by the USA Center for Strategic & International Studies & information security firm McAfee, a subsidiary of Intel, titled “Net Losses: Estimating the Global Cost of Cybercrime; Economic impact of cybercrime II” shows that 0.80% of Nigeria’s GDP, equivalent to the Cement sector, is lost to cybercrime.Nigeria’s GDP in 2014 was $568.51ii billion.

This amounts to an annual loss of $450 million. Equivalent to N89.55Billion annual direct losses to the Nigerian economy, at the CBN exchange rate of N199 to $1”.

“In January 2016 the infamous “Anonymous hacker collective has started a cyber-campaign against the government of Nigeria, accusing it of corruption, greed, & theft.The Nigerian Communications Commission indicates that, as at September 2015, over 97 million Nigerians used the Internet on a daily basis”, he added.

He observed that a 2015 survey, by Kaspersky Lab, shows that 45.3 per cent of the Internet users in Nigeria suffered the attack in the third quarter of 2015.” By implication, either you or the person next to you was hacked in some way”.

0 Comments