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| Nigeria Navy |
Abuja —
Chief of Defense Staff, Air Chief Marshal Oluseyi Petinrin, raised alarm, Tuesday, that the Defense
Headquarters' website and that of the Nigerian Navy had been hacked into by
terrorists, adding that the threat posed by the Boko Haram sect, through online
reports of their activities needed to be effectively checked.
Petinrin
raised the alarm just as the Chief of Defense Communications, Air Vice Marshal
Osmond Amu warned that if cybercrime was not checked, "the security
challenges the country is currently facing, such as killings, bombs by Boko
Haram, kidnapping, pipeline vandalism, oil theft, corruption and so on, which
had kept the armed forces and other security agencies on their toes, would be
nothing compared to the potential threats inherent in cyber space."
Speaking in
Abuja, at the opening of the World Cyber Conference, the CDS, who was
represented by Major-General K. Amao, Chief of Research and Development, DHQ,
said to checkmate hacking into the websites of security agencies, "DHQ has
achieved successes in the deployment of Information and Communication
Technology, ICT, surveillance and tracking equipment to locate criminal
elements in our society and perpetrators of the Boko Haram menace.
"However,
further successes would be achieved if we appropriately apply cyber technology
and space researches to tackle the country's contemporary security
problems." Declaring that it was no longer news that Nigeria has been
making moves towards the actualization of a cashless economy, the CDS said:
"Before the pronouncement of the cashless policy, cyber-attacks had been a
major threat to the Nigerian economy. The threat to the Nigerian cashless
policy can, therefore, never be overlooked.
"While
the country's apex bank, CBN, backs this policy, commercial banks over the last
few months have also keyed into the initiative.”Cyber-attacks may stand out as
a stumbling block or threat to the actualization of this project, except
concrete measures is put in place to counter such attacks."
On his part,
AVM Amu said: "The armed forces and other security agencies are by
themselves incapable of containing the physical security challenges, hence the
call for collective participation. Same applies to the containment of cyber
threat, but with a higher universal involvement."
In her
message, Minister of State for defense, Erelu Olusola
Obada, said the prevalence of
cyber crime is a worrisome development as Nigeria becomes more reliant on ICT.
Vanguard Nigeria
Vanguard Nigeria