The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) Tuesday disclosed that Nigeria currently ranks third globally in cybercrimes, behind the UK and US.
NCC’s Chief Executive Officer, Umar Danbatta, who disclosed this at the ongoing 2017 Annual General Conference of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) in Lagos with the theme, “African Business: Penetrating through Institution Building”, said the number of internet users in Nigeria has hit 91.6 million.
According to him, “about N127 billion was estimated to have been lost to cybercrime in Nigeria in 2015. A critical factor militating against Africa’s economic resurgence is the weakness of its institutions.
He said: “Nigeria ranks 169 out of 199 on the World Bank’s ease of doing business rankings; we are in a middle of a revolution and the rise of what we call the networked society. The NCC stipulates the laws of engagement that will make the cyberspace safe and ensure the confidence as well as the safety of the cyberspace,” Danbatta, a panellist, said.
“There are benefits and risks of the use of cyberspace and both have to be properly managed.”
In her contributions, Ms. Sascha Grimme, the Associate Solicitor of LLP, a UK-based law firm, said, “threats and perpetrators of cybercrimes and the motives behind the cyber-attacks have to be properly identified.
“There are challenges in identifying perpetrators of cybercrimes; even when identified, there have been instances where they stay in different jurisdictions making prosecution difficult.”
Mr. Bayo Adekanmi, Chief Transformation Officer at MTN, while speaking, noted that there is an ongoing online revolution happening in modern times, and that online security was very important.
“There is going to be what I call a technology apocalypse; you will wake up one day and someone is living your life somewhere. Someone once said that identity theft is worse than kidnapping; there is a thin line between privacy and security in modern business,” the MTN executive said.