Governor Godwin Obaseki of Edo has said that reforms by his administration in the digital and technology space over the last eight years have revolutionised the state.

The Governor who stated this on Friday at the launch of the Edo State Digital Policy and Edo Data Centre, disclosed that was the first data centre owned by a state in Nigeria.

According to him, his reforms had repositioned Edo as a leading state in digital inclusion in Nigeria, adding that his government was leveraging technology as a catalyst for socio-economic development and inclusive growth.

He said: “I welcome you to the only data center owned by a state in Nigeria. This event is significant because we have started a revolution in Edo State, a digital revolution. We are rounding up with a policy statement that will guide this revolution into the future.

“The population of Edo is scaled towards the youths as they are born in a digital age. The future is digital. It will be difficult to navigate the world today without technology. If you want to develop and grow rapidly, you must begin to think of how to use technology.

“The pace of the advancement of technology in the world today is scary. So, just imagine those who have not started yet; I don’t think they can live in the future world. In Edo, we have always been ahead in our history. We have been a knowledgeable people as we interacted at a global level over 500 years ago on our own level.

“To catch up, we had to do something else and different. That was why from the beginning it was clear to us that we had to introduce technology and make sure that we begin to retrain our young ones, the youths, to own this digital world and the confidence in it.”

Obaseki added: “We have moved Edo into the digital superhighway and to operate on that superhighway, they must know the rules and must be guided by certain rules and practices. That is what we are doing today and incorporating in this policy document. This will enable everybody to understand the shape of this high way and what they need to do on this high way.”

The governor continued: “I had the privilege of working with young people in Edo State and working together, we set up EdoJobs and the Edo Innovate Hub as these have helped our young people and till date, over 50,000 young men and women have benefited from various training and programmes from Edo Innovate. We have been lucky to build a digital ecosystem which has grown rapidly.

“Years ago, as the Chairman of the State’s Economy Team, we set up the ICTA but we struggled all through but we kept it alive, and set up the law governing it. The agency is principally responsible for providing technology for the government.

“I am proud today of what we have done in Edo State which is all-encompassing as no aspect of government in Edo State that has not been digitized or in the process of digitization. All Government jobs have been digitized, and it is not difficult to operate in Edo as files can’t miss again.”

He said: “Technology has made it easy for our children to learn in school through the EdoBEST programme. We have over 400,000 children in our public schools. We have data in all our public schools, teachers, parents and ward of our pupils.

“You can go to any of our primary healthcare centers today without seeing your records, especially if you have registered and with our health insurance. Security, healthcare, agriculture, education and other areas, we have introduced technology.

IHS Nigeria, part of the IHS Holding Limited (NYSE: IHS) (“IHS Towers”) group, one of the largest independent owners, operators, and developers of shared communications infrastructure in the world by tower count, has announced the donation of four solar-powered boreholes to support victims of recent floods in Maiduguri, Borno State.

The donation, which will be delivered through the United Nations Children’s Fund’s (UNICEF) emergency flood response, will help address the most urgent needs of flood-affected populations in Borno State, especially those displaced following flooding in Maiduguri Metropolitan Council, Jere and Konduga LGAs.

The response by IHS Nigeria and UNICEF will help mitigate the impact of the flood and the risk of waterborne diseases for nearly 20,000 people, including vulnerable groups such as pregnant women and young mothers, children, and patients visiting health centers.

The four solar-powered boreholes donated by IHS Nigeria will be constructed in displaced peoples’ settlements and other temporary displacement sites.

This will include in densely populated areas without access to a safe water source, at schools to help facilitate the early return of children to classes, and at health centers, which are also used as Outpatient Therapeutic Program sites and provide nutrition services and counselling for pregnant women, young mothers, and malnourished children.

Mohamad Darwish, CEO, IHS Nigeria, said, “We empathize with the government and people of Borno State and extend our sympathies to those who lost loved ones and properties in the flood.

“We are aware that as people begin to return to their homes and communities with flood waters receding, they continue to face major risk factors, including damaged and contaminated water sources.

“A key priority for us, which informed our donation of these boreholes, is to help prevent or limit outbreaks of communicable diseases such as cholera, while improving water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) services for affected populations.

This donation is an extension of our partnership with UNICEF, which since 2021 has supported the provision of WASH facilities to over 6,000 beneficiaries and enabled the delivery of over one million preventive and curative treatments for tropical diseases related to WASH.”

Cristian Munduate, UNICEF Representative in Nigeria, said, “UNICEF is very grateful to IHS Nigeria for their generous donation of solar-powered boreholes, which comes at a critical time for communities affected by recent floods in Borno State.

“This contribution will not only provide essential safe water to thousands, but also protect vulnerable populations, including children, from the threat of waterborne diseases, and support communities as they work to start rebuilding their lives and livelihood.

“Together with IHS Nigeria, we are making significant strides in safeguarding children and families, and strengthening resilience through our shared commitment to water, sanitation and hygiene services in emergencies.”

IHS Nigeria’s long-standing partnership with UNICEF was recently demonstrated by the visit of Kitty van der Heidjen, UNICEF’s Deputy Executive Director, Partnerships, and her team to the company’s Head Office in Lagos.

Kitty van der Heidjen expressed her appreciation for the ongoing partnership with IHS Nigeria in empowering the country’s youth through education and digital connectivity. Under UNICEF’s Generation Unlimited (GenU) Project, designed to improve digital learning in Nigeria, IHS Nigeria has helped provide internet connectivity to 800 educational institutions between 2022 and 2024.

Through a collaborative partnership with UNICEF that began in 2019, IHS Nigeria has invested more than $4 million in various initiatives, including GenU 9ja, COVID-19 interventions, oxygen plant installations, WASH initiatives and school connectivity.

Sophos, a global leader of innovative security solutions for defeating cyberattacks, today released “Pacific Rim,” a report detailing its defensive and counter-offensive operation over the last five years with multiple interlinked nation-state adversaries based in China targeting perimeter devices, including Sophos Firewalls.

The attackers used a series of campaigns with novel exploits and customized malware to embed tools to conduct surveillance, sabotage and cyberespionage as well as overlapping tactics, tools and procedures (TTPs) with well-known Chinese nation-state groups including Volt Typhoon, APT31 and APT41.

The adversaries targeted both small and large critical infrastructure and government targets, primarily located in South and South-East Asia, including nuclear energy suppliers, a national capital’s airport, a military hospital, state security apparatus, and central government ministries.

Throughout Pacific Rim, Sophos X-Ops, the company’s cybersecurity and threat intelligence unit, worked to neutralize the adversaries’ moves and continuously evolved defenses and counter-offensives.

After Sophos successfully responded to the initial attacks, the adversaries escalated their efforts and brought in more experienced operators. Sophos subsequently uncovered a vast adversarial ecosystem.

While Sophos released details starting in 2020 on the campaigns associated, including Cloud Snooper and Asnarök, the company is sharing the overall investigation analysis to raise awareness of the persistence of Chinese nation-state adversaries and their hyperfocus to compromise perimeter, unpatched and end-of-life (EOL) devices, often via zero-day exploits they are creating for those devices.

Sophos is also encouraging all organizations to urgently apply patches for vulnerabilities discovered in any of their internet-facing devices and to migrate any older unsupported devices to current models.

Sophos regularly updates all of its supported products based on new threats and indicators of compromise (IoCs) to protect customers. Sophos Firewall customers are protected via rapid hotfixes that are now turned on by default.

“The reality is that edge devices have become highly attractive targets for Chinese nation-state groups like Volt Typhoon and others as they look to build operational relay boxes (ORBs) to obfuscate and support their activity.

“This includes directly targeting an organization for espionage, or indirectly leveraging any weak points for onward attacks – essentially becoming collateral damage. Even organizations that are not targets are getting hit.

“Network devices designed for businesses are natural targets for these purposes – they are powerful, always on, and have constant connectivity,” said Ross McKerchar, CISO at Sophos.

“When a group seeking to build a global network of ORBs targeted some of our devices, we responded by applying the same detection and response techniques we use to defend our corporate endpoints and network devices.

“This allowed us to burn multiple operations and tap into a valuable stream of threat intelligence that we applied to protect our customers from both future widespread attacks and highly targeted operations.”

Highlights of the Report

●        On Dec. 4, 2018, a low-privileged computer connected to an overhead display began to scan the Sophos network—seemingly on its own—at the India headquarters of Cyberoam, a company Sophos acquired in 2014. Sophos found a payload quietly listening for specialized inbound internet traffic on the computer that contained a novel type of backdoor and a complex rootkit — “Cloud Snooper.”

●        In April 2020, after several organizations reported a user interface pointing to a domain with “Sophos” in its name. Sophos worked with European law enforcement, which tracked down and confiscated the server the adversaries used to deploy malicious payloads in what Sophos later dubbed Asnarök. Sophos neutralized Asnarök, which the company was able to attribute to China, by taking over the malware’s command and control (C2) channel. It also allowed Sophos to neutralize a planned wave of botnet attacks.

●        After Asnarök, Sophos advanced its intelligence operations by creating an additional threat actor tracking program focused on identifying and disrupting adversaries looking to exploit Sophos devices deployed in customer environments; the program was built using a combination of open-source intelligence, web analytics, telemetry monitoring, and targeted kernel implants deployed to the attackers’ research devices.

●        Next, the attackers showed an increasing level of persistence, upleveling their tactics and deploying increasingly stealthy malware. However, using its threat actor tracking program and enhanced telemetry gathering capabilities, Sophos was able to pre-empt several attacks and obtain a copy of a UEFI bootkit and custom exploits before they could be deployed broadly.

●        A few months later, Sophos tracked some of the attacks to an adversary who has demonstrated links to China and Sichuan Silence Information Technology’s Double Helix Research Institute in the country’s Chengdu region.

●        In March 2022, an anonymous security researcher reported a zero-day remote code execution vulnerability, designated CVE-2022-1040, to Sophos as part of the company’s bug bounty program. Further investigation revealed that this CVE was already being exploited in the wild in multiple operations—operations that Sophos was then able to stop impacting customers. After deeper analysis, Sophos determined the person reporting the exploit may have had a connection to the adversaries.

“This was the second time Sophos received a suspiciously timed “tip” about an exploit before it was used maliciously.

“Recent advisories from CISA have made it clear that Chinese nation-state groups have become a perennial threat to nations’ critical infrastructure,” McKerchar continued.

“What we tend to forget is that small- and medium-sized businesses—those that form the bulk of the supply chain for critical infrastructure—are targets since they are often the weak links in this supply chain.

“Unfortunately, these businesses often have fewer resources to defend against such sophisticated threats. Further complicating matters is the tendency for these adversaries to gain a foothold and dig in, making it hard to evict them.

“The modus operandi of China-based adversaries is creating long-term persistence and complex obfuscated attacks. They won’t stop until they’re disrupted.”

Industry Quotes About Sophos’ Pacific Rim Report

“Through the JCDC, CISA obtains and shares crucial intelligence on the cybersecurity challenges we face, including the advanced tactics and techniques used by People’s Republic of China (PRC) state-sponsored cyber actors.

“The expertise of partners like Sophos and reports like its Pacific Rim report, provides the global cyber community more insights into the PRC’s evolving behaviors.

“By working side-by-side, we are helping cyber defenders understand the scale and widespread exploitation of edge network devices and implement mitigation strategies,” said Jeff Greene, executive assistant director for cybersecurity at CISA. “CISA continues to highlight how classes of vulnerabilities, including SQL injections and memory safety vulnerabilities, continue to be exploited en masse.

“We urge software manufacturers to review our Secure by Design resources and, as Sophos has done in this case, put its principles into practice. We encourage others to take the pledge and to review our alerts on how to eliminate common classes of defects.”

“Many cybersecurity vendors conduct adversarial research operations, but few are able to successfully do so against such a challenging set of nation-state adversaries for such a long period of time,” said Eric Parizo, managing principal analyst with the cybersecurity research group at Omdia.

“Sophos made the most of a highly unique opportunity, and it should be lauded for delivering research and tactical takeaways that will help better defend its customers now and well into the future.”

“At NCSC-NL, one of our tasks is to share information and connect organisations.

“Facilitating communication and cooperation between national and international organisations is of great importance to improve cyber resilience.

“We are happy to have been able to make a contribution to this investigation with Sophos,” said Hielke Bontius, head of operations, NCSC-NL.

Advice for Defenders

Organizations should expect all internet-facing devices are prime targets for nation-state adversaries, especially those devices in critical infrastructure. Sophos encourages organizations to take the following actions to strengthen their security posture.

●        Minimize internet-facing services and devices when possible

●        Prioritize patching with urgency for internet-facing devices and monitor these devices

●        Enable hotfixes for edge devices to be allowed and applied automatically

●        Collaborate with law enforcement, public-private partners, and government to share and act on relevant IoCs

●        Create a plan for how your organization deals with EOL devices

“We need to work collaboratively across the public and private sector, law enforcement and governments, and the security industry, to share what we know about these adversarial operations. Targeting the very same edge devices that are deployed to protect networks is a bold and clever tactic. Organizations, channel partners and Managed Service Providers need to understand that these devices are top targets for attackers and should ensure they are appropriately hardened, and critical patches are applied as soon as they are released.

In fact, we know that attackers are actively hunting for EOL devices. Vendors play a big part here, too. They need to help customers by supporting reliable and well-tested hot fixing, making it easy to upgrade from EOL platforms, systematically refactoring or removing legacy code that can harbor lingering vulnerabilities, continuously improving secure by default designs to offload the customer burden of hardening, and monitoring the integrity of our deployed devices,” concluded McKerchar.