Nigeria Holds 70th Position on Cyber Crime Chart

As per the latest report by Symantec on "Internet Security Threat (volume XV)" for the time period from January 1, 2009 to December 31, 2009, Nigeria stood at 70th place on the world chart for harmful attacks and cyber crime.

Mr. Gordon Love, Regional Director for Africa, Symantec, has stated that the cyber attacks have come a long way from simple scams to refined intelligent campaigns hitting some of the world's biggest government entities and corporations, as per the reports by IT News Africa on May 25, 2010.

Love has further stated that Nigeria occupied the 43rd position in EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) and 70th in the world for harmful attacks during 2009. Considering the financial gain which the hacked corporate Intellectual Property (IP) offers, attackers have started inclining towards enterprises. The report has discovered that hackers are efficiently misusing the plenty of private data available on social networking websites in order to create socially engineered attacks for important individuals working at the targeted firms.

Further, the report states that software has brought down the bar to entry for new hackers, making it simple for unskilled hackers to hit systems and steal data. With kits like "Zeus botnet," hackers produce several harmful code variants for avoiding detection by security software.

It has also been found that the latest hackers employ social networking methods to entice innocent users to harmful sites.

The extent of these harmful attacks and the fact that they evolve from all over the world, make it a global problem that could be dealt with the assistance of both the government and private sectors.

During May 2008, a Nigerian man received punishment of one and a half years imprisonment for persuading a NASA employee so that he could sneak malware on her system and steal banking data, passwords and 25,000 screenshots.

Besides cyber crime, Nigeria is also a dominant name in piracy. In the third week of May 2010, the Business Software Alliance, BSA and IDC Global Software Piracy Study came up with another worrying report about the soaring piracy rate in Nigeria at 83%.

The report mentioned that the Nigerian economy suffered a loss of US$ 156 Million to software piracy in 2009 as compared to US$132 Million in 2008.

» SPAMfighter News - 6/4/2010