Cyber terrorists, a band of premeditated and dangerous criminals are threatening a reign of terror of unimaginable proportions on the country, underscoring the need for decisive measures to stem the tide, Nigeria CommunicationsWeek investigations can now reveal.
These unarmed but lethal terrorists now pose a threat beyond the fraudulent and expensive repercussions of hacking and even the monster called corruption.
Experts said that it is no longer just a threat to industry and individuals. Evidence suggests that governments are now using the Internet for espionage and cyber attacks on the critical national infrastructure (financial markets, utility providers, air traffic control) of other countries.
Nigeria’s vulnerability to cyber terrorism is exacerbated by lack of skills, manpower, political will and structures including legal and locally engineered infrastructures as well as reliance on external forces for the deployment, design and development of our ICT solutions.
Chris Uwaje, president of Global Network for Cyber Solutions, said the tampering with News Agency of Nigeria’s (NAN) official email penultimate week which led to the closure of Channels Television for a story on the President’s rumoured resignation, were horrible examples of cyber terrorism.
The criminals also successfully logged into The Punch, Nigeria’s leading daily newspaper’s website and boasted that it logged out the newspaper’s webmaster.
Uwaje, warned that the earlier Nigeria started thinking of how to harness her national database - name, date of birth, date of death, house number, education, consumer records - the catastrophe that is on the way may not be abated, adding that the impact of hackers goes on colossal numbers of trillion.
It would be recalled that Nigerian financial institutions only last year lost about N7.4 billion to cyber thieves underscoring the dangerous trend the development has undertaken.
Identity thieves have also been unleashing reign of terror on banks’ customers relieving them of their hard-earned cash.
Experts say that cyber terrorists are capitalizing on the uncharted nature of the country’s Internet landscape to perpetrate their heinous crime.
Anonymity of the Internet, lack of effective policing as well as absence of records of punishment, have helped the terrorists operate unhindered.
Around the world, countries have set up organs charged with combating cyber terrorism.
The United States for instance has the United States Strategic Command with the duty of combating cyber terrorism. This is accomplished through the Joint Task Force-Global Network Operations (JTF-GNO).
Nigeria is starting late as the Senate is now considering a law to stop fraud and other Internet-related financial crimes. Penalty for culprits when the law comes to fruition is a jail term of at least five years and a maximum of 14 years. The bill passed first reading before the Senate proceeded on a two-week Sallah break.
Beyond that, Uwaje has canvassed for ministry of Information and Communications Technology that will monitor what is going on our cyber space as well as build a broadband to filter information consumed in the country.
