Cybercrime is the greatest threat to every company in the world and one of the biggest problems with mankind.
With more people working from home, cyber security has never been more important for anyone who uses the internet but as cybercriminals adapt to the ever-changing cyber security and regulatory landscape which may pave the way for new and unforeseen threats
It is crucial for us to adopt a comprehensive security approach to protect ourselves against these risks as no one is immune to the risk of a breach.
Remi Afon, President of the Cyber Security Experts Association of Nigeria shared some insights into this.
CFA: Remi, glad to have you on the show today.
Remi: Good to be here, thanks for having me.
CFA: Awesome. What would you describe as the cyber security landscape for 2021 going into 2022?
Remi: cyber security landscape in 2021, we witnessed a lot of cyber security attacks, there were a lot of unprecedented cyber security attacks in 2021.
Just recently, just last month, December 9th, there was this acute remote code execution vulnerability reported in the apache login package which we call log 4J.
Within 24 hours, more than 3.7 million hacking attempts were made to exploit this vulnerability and that’s to tell you the level of attacks that we face in 2021.
There were a lot of ransomware attacks in 2021 and we are expecting a lot more in 2022. In 2021, there about 37% of global organizations said that they witnessed one form of a ransomware attack or the other and in 2022, this is expected to rise, even in Nigeria, a lot of organizations witnessed cyber attacks from ransomware to denial of service attacks but because people don’t report in Nigeria, we have the issue of reporting so a lot of organizations just kept quiet and they continued as business as usual so we are unable to come up with statistics of ransomware attacks.
CFA: So going from the very beginning, should we be worried as Nigerians when it comes to cyber security?
Remi: Absolutely, we should be worried, because the cybercriminals are not relenting in their efforts. There are going to be a lot of attack vectors and attacks that will take place in 2022.
We are looking at more ransomware, more denial of service attacks, businesses compromise, and social engineering.
As Nigeria is moving towards election coming up in 2023, there is what we call deep fates and fake names.
Deep fates are just videos, images, and audio recordings that are manipulated by artificial intelligence technology we’re going to be seeing that a lot where people will be manipulating politicians and then claiming that they said this, they said that just to confuse people as the election is coming nearer. (Watch the full video here)
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