A report on Nigeria’s Cyber Threat Landscape 2022 by the Cyber Security Experts Association of Nigeria (CSEAN) revealed that Small and Medium Scale Enterprises (SMEs) had more cyber threats in 2022.

John Odumesi, director of research and development at CSEAN, presented the findings at their two-day conference titled “Cyber security: a Digital Transformative Tool in Achieving Sustainable Development Goals’’ on Tuesday in Abuja.

Mr Odumesi said the research mirrored the cyber-attack trend in 2022, which would serve as a guiding tool on occurrences in 2023.

“Part of the findings and key threat trends we discovered is that data protection policies enforcement and disclosure practices are grossly lagging; there is a surge in corporate phishing attacks.

“There is a rise of ransomware in the industrial control system environment, compromise of business emails, and malware such as Backdoor skyrocketed.

“We also observed that the 2023 general elections triggered a deluge of misinformation, disinformation and attacks on small businesses –which was more than double,” said Mr Odumesi.

According to him, 97 per cent of individuals lost $1,000 in the first quarter of 2022. 

“In the first three-quarter of 2022, 97 per cent of individuals lost about $1000, but we were not able to classify losses by organisations, but we classified the increase in the attack.

“For SMEs, there was an increase in phishing attacks of 84 per cent compared to the previous year of 37 per cent,’’ he said.

Mr Odumesi urged the government to enforce regulations on data privacy and inform the public when institutions were under attack to take precautionary measures.

He suggested ways such as maintaining a cyber security policy, developing an incident response plan, surfing the internet wisely and avoiding password pitfalls for curbing cyber threats.

Mr Odumesi said the research survey engaged 552 participants, peer and non-peer-reviewed sources, online media, cyber security reports, and open-source intelligence, among other sources.

Yaniv Ovitz, chief cyber technology officer at CyberSoc Africa, said the cyber security ecosystem could create massive jobs for youths in the country to reduce the mass exodus of talents abroad known as the ‘”apa syndrome.”

Mr Ovitz said there was general progress in combating cybercrime in which the FinTech industry took the lead in 2019 with frameworks and regulations.

(NAN)