Wanted! Cyber Security Framework, Others to Fight Cyber-Attacks

Cyber security experts have urged relevant agencies of government to put in place necessary framework to secure the country against impending cyber- attacks.

This is coming against the backdrop of recent report by F5 Networks highlighting that the growing scale and intensity of Distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks in the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region which witnessed an uptick in the last quarter and are set to intensify in 2017.

Ahmed Adesanya, IT Security and Connectivity consultant, said that DDOS attacks are carried out for political or financial reasons and it targets organizations that warehouses relevant data such as INEC, Banks, NIBSS where BVN data are stored, among others.

“One of the ways to mitigating such cyber- attacks is for organizations or country to implement a proper cyber security framework to protect their national critical infrastructure. Presently, there is no national cyber security framework in the country, government need to fast-track the adoption of Cobit 5 as a framework to address cyber security issues and secure the country against this impending DDOS attack,” he said.

Oluseyi Akindeinde, chief technical officer, Digital Encode, a cyber-security firm, expects efforts to be intensified in terms of cyber security tool acquisition and technical capacity building by the various financial institutions in combating cybercrime and electronic fraud.

“Nobody can be 100% adequately prepared to tackle cybercrime but a lot has already been done to mitigate clear and present threats.  However, there is need for organizations and financial institutions to fortify their defenses, develop a cyber- security operations centre, and a lot of capacity development for their human resources required to check electronic fraud,” he said.

He noted that, in view of the DDOS report targeting Africa, most critical services in Nigeria are already protected or in the process of being protected from DDOS especially by the financial institutions as they will be the most affected.

“We don’t envisage any imminent security risks. More so, Nigeria needs an advanced Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) for cyber security as well as a core team of cyber experts to man her operations centre,” he added.

DDOS attacks have been around since at least 2000. These attacks refer to a situation in which many compromised machines flood a target with requests for information. The target can't handle the onslaught of requests, so it crashes.

Consultancy firm Deloitte also expects cyber-attacks to enter the terabit era in 2017, with DDOS attacks becoming larger in scale, harder to mitigate and more frequent.

F5 Networks points out that in 2016 to date, it has handled and mitigated 8 536 DDOS instances.