In Africa, the peril of cybercrimes recorded a massive rise in the first six months of 2022, “with phishing and scams hitting 438 per cent and 174 per cent in Kenya and Nigeria, respectively.”
Here are 5 of the top cybercrimes affecting businesses and individuals in 2023:
•Phishing Scams.
•Website Spoofing.
•Ransomware.
•Malware.
•IOT Hacking.
According to the World Economic Forum’s report Globalization 4.0, “More organizations than ever are conducting business online” (Davos 2019).
The spate of rising preponderance of digital footprints and sophistication in cyber-attacks has prompted the urgency to intensely secure data and other organizational resources from exposure to activities of cybercriminals.
This has been the reason for increasing cost of deploying ICT within institutions due to added costs of enhancing security from cyber-attacks.
On this backdrop, Gartner1 predicted that worldwide spending on information security will significantly grow to $124 billion in 2019.
And still, spending according to some security researchers estimate that cybercrime costs will quadruple from its figure in 2015 to about $2.1 trillion by end-2019, and outpace expenditure on cyber-security by over 16 times.
The vulnerability of this electronic market to criminal activities has therefore been a growing concern.
Nigeria’s internet penetration since the 21st century had been on the increase. Internet users as a percentage of the population increased significantly from 3.5% in 2005 to 47.4% in 2014 (WDI, 2016).
Similarly, tele-density has been forecasted to continuously increase overtime in Nigeria (Asemota, et al, 2015). The proliferation of internet in Nigeria has indeed come with unintended consequence, as a haven for criminals.
Cybercrime has remained a challenging issue despite increasing awareness and attention to addressing the menace in Nigeria and across the globe. For instance, Cybercrime accounted for about 43% of total monetary loss due to fraud in 2016.
Cybercriminals make life miserable for ordinary Nigerians. Every day in Nigeria, innocent people loose access to their online accounts.
This means they can no longer communicate with loved ones and they lose access to photographs and other personal information.
We need to ensure our young people stay away from cybercrime, and instead spend their time learning digital skills that will give them a long term income.
In the Nigeria of today,a lot of youths no longer believe in the impact of education in their life and most of the youths don’t believe that they can still become successful individuals in the society without having to scam.
Today in almost every neighborhood in Nigeria,the youths and young teenagers are now involved in scamming innocent people of their money,gmail accounts, bank accounts, credit cards and so many other different kinds of scams they pull. This has created a really bad identity for the image of the country on its own because now in the world Nigeria is known for being scammers and this doesn’t create a good look even for individuals who are not into scamming.
Currently in the world,Nigeria is ranked the 9th country in the world with the most scamming country.
In the past, little was known about cybercrime, but as the internet grew worldwide, the unintended consequences of computerization manifested in global notoriety. It is a worldwide problem that costs countries, businesses and individuals billions of dollars.
The first reported cybercrime was committed by employees of a company in the 1960s and involved the company’s mainframe computer (Maitanmi et al., 2013).
In recent times however, it not only involves employees of companies or nations, but includes organized criminal gangs, terrorists, rogue governments and individuals (in isolated cases).
•Akinyele Daniel Demilade
