Cybersecurity experts have decried cyber security laws in Africa that are not addressing peculiar cyber- attacks, hence a big challenge in the prosecution of cyber criminals.
They argued that most of the cyber security laws in Nigeria and other African countries are borrowed from Asian countries which address tools, techniques and processes of cyber -attacks that have changed.
William Makatiani, managing director, Serianu, told Nigeria CommunicationsWeek, that Cyber security changes very fast hence laws addressing it must constantly be reviewed.
“Four years ago we didn’t know about Ransomeware, we didn’t know about crypto mining, crypto mining is a biggest thing today. What we see across the world is instead of us to focus on technology, we focus on principles of a crime which means at the end of the day it is fraud, unauthorised access, as well as sabotage and those were the results of somebody coming in and compromising in an environment.
“Most of our laws are copy and paste especially from Malaysia, Singapore. We copy our laws from those countries across Africa and if you look at the laws we have in place, they focus a lot on tools and techniques and that is what is out-dated.
“The tools, techniques and processes of attacking have changed. We have to change from focusing so much on tools, techniques and processes and focus on fraud. For instance, somebody did A,B,C,D whichever way they did it, it is still a fraud.
“Criminals 100 years ago were interested in stealing money, information about you, interested in making sure you don’t move, it is the same thing today. Criminal are interested in stealing money from banks, making sure you don’t provide service, interested in stealing Intellectual Property (IP) or private data. In terms of motive they have not changed, intentions have not changed and therefore we have to build flexible laws that address motives, intensions and the principles of what the laws are trying to achieve to deter,” he said.
Corroborating Makatiani, Remi Afon, member, Board of Trustees of Cyber Security Experts Association of Nigeria, said that cyber- crime is dynamic and changes from time to time.
“When the cyber- crime law was passed a few years ago, there was no mention of cyptocurrency. A lot of cyber -criminal were not in the dark web. So there is a need for cybercrime laws to keep changing to keep pace with the activities in cyberspace.
Makatiani further urged African countries as a way of building skills in cyber security to review curriculum of technology programmes in colleges
“If I was an ambitious leader I will cancel quite a number of technology programmes in our colleges, they are wasting time. Get in touch with the industry; get some professional from other countries to look at the areas of Artificial Intelligent, and Analytics, look at the areas of cyber security to build practical programmes.
“Start with forcing graduates to do one to two years’ programme where they learn practical, set up research foundations behind these new technologies, because if you don’t do it now, even smaller countries like Rwanda, Botswana Mauritius will be more powerful than bigger countries like even South Africa, Nigeria. In some of these areas, the problem is to start early.
“More so, they need to change the curriculum, the curriculum we have now is useless, yes it builds the people to the level where you can convert them, but it doesn’t build the curiosity to continue building your capability into analytics crypto. If you look at the curriculums of those in the United States, UK and Europe even Rwanda and Mauritius you see the embedding of these new technologies, new media first of all you have to start with that.