Senate raises alarm on possible Cyber attacks

The Senate on Tuesday urged the National Security Adviser to alert all security agencies and financial institutions in the country about current and threatening dimensions of cyber-attacks.

The decision is contained in the resolutions of the Senate at Tuesday’s plenary on a motion on the worrisome dimensions of cyber-crime and industry (urgent need for concerted efforts to secure Nigeria’s cyberspace) sponsored by Senator Buhari Abdulfatai (Oyo North).

The Senate also mandated the its Committee on ICT and Cybercrime to immediately convoke a National Stakeholders Conference on Cyber Security with a view to stimulating a collective reflection among relevant stakeholders and articulating a national and broad-based approach to keeping the country ahead of the challenge.

Senator Buhari Abdulfatai, who in his motion had expressed concern that that there is an urgent need to scale up Nigeria’s consciousness​towards protection of the country’s Cyber space, said he was alarmed about revelations from studies that about 70% of hacking attempts so far, i.e about 3,500 Cyber – attacks on the Nigeria ICT space, have been successful resulting in in loss of over $450 million and that Government servers are currently under serious threat.

“We are further alarmed about oversight findings of the Senate Committee on ICT and Cybercrime which reveal that ICT shortfall in the country is enormous, that Nigeria’s​ Cyber space is porous and that the system lacks a well-structured and effective approach to Cybercrime control”, he stated.

Abdulfatai noted that the positive posture of ICT revolution is being dampened by malicious activities of criminal elements in society which invade the cyberspace, presenting risks to business, national economies and security such as malicious use of the social media, identity theft, electronic fraud, data damage or alteration, espionage, etc.

He stressed that these elements have developed several hacking technics, one of the most recent being ‘Ransomware’ known as ‘WannaCry Worm or WannaCrypt which infects computer operating systems and networks, encrypt files and ask for ransom.

The Senator added that Cyber-attacks are taking a dangerous dimension all over the world, citing for instance that Lloyds Banking Group and Barclays Bank of UK suffered 48 hour online attack from 11th to 13th of January this year in which criminals be attempted to block about 20 million accounts, bombarded Llyods, Halifax and Bank of Scotland with millions of fake requests designed to grind the groups’ systems to a halt and asked for a huge ransom in bit coins to end the attacks which was prevented by the Denial of Access (DoS) system.

He further explained that on “12th of May alone this year, at least 200,000 targets in over 150 countries were hit by Cyber- attacks which the Internet Protocol suggested to have originated from the Middle East particularly from Syria and Iran, as well as from Kenya, supposedly using a malware known as Lazurus to compromise systems in banking and information networks, with no clear evidence yet as to how the act was perfected, and that the criminals are already targeting Nigeria “.

He urged the Senate on the urgent need to up-scale Nigeria’s consciousness towards protection of the country’s cyberspace.