State-sponsored cyber attacks, combated by Nigeria and others

Digital Crime

Nigeria and other nations with inadequate cyber security profiles are threatened by a barrage of state-sponsored malicious cyber activities as geopolitical and geoeconomic tensions rise.

Experts have cautioned that even when they happen with modest intensity, these could still be extremely dangerous. Since the start of the year, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has issued at least six warnings about cyberattacks. The warnings followed an increase in both local and international cyberattacks.

State-sponsored cyber events have jeopardized the security of key infrastructure in nations all over the world, from software supply chain intrusions to alleged attempted theft of confidential COVID-19 vaccine research to power supply cutoffs.

Governments and corporations everywhere should be creating new cybersecurity efforts and strategies in response. These were disclosed on the August 29–September 16 Cybersecurity Virtual Reporting Tour. The event, which has as its theme “A Shared Responsibility: Prioritizing Public-Private Partnerships in Cybersecurity,” is being organized by Foreign Press Centers of the United States.

A record for the most data breaches and other cyber incidents involving businesses, governments, and people occurred in the United States in 2021, it was revealed.

The cost of data breaches in 2021 was $4.24 million, a 10% rise from the previous year, according to the most recent data breach study from IBM and the Ponemon Institute, a research institute devoted to privacy, data protection, and ethical research standards and the cost of data breaches in 2021 stood at $4.24 million, which was a 10 per cent increase from the average cost recorded in 2019.

According to the research, the number of reported breach occurrences rose by 14% in the first quarter of 2022 compared to the same period in 2021.

According to Cybersecurity Ventures, which was mentioned, ransomware assaults accounted for the majority of the $6 trillion global average cost of cybercrime in 2021. By 2025, this might reach $10.5 trillion.

Speaking on the subject of “Overview of Cybersecurity and its Impact,” Chris Inglis, National Cyber Director and Joe Biden’s cybersecurity advisor, stressed the importance of knowing who is in charge of what in cyberspace.

“We will have dealt with all three of the most crucial components of the term of cyberspace if we get the duties and responsibilities in cyberspace, the people skills in cyberspace, and the technology in cyberspace right. Technology, people, jobs, and duties all coexist in cyberspace, he asserted.

Inglis emphasized that cyber is more than technology; it is people and doctrine, and it needs that people produce what is expected of it. He noted that cyber is vital because of what it does for the people.

According to him, three things are essential; “one, we need to make sure that we make the investments required to make sure that it’s resilient and robust by design, in the same way to my earlier point we do that for cars and airplanes and therapeutics. We invest in those to make sure that we can have confidence in the functions that they perform before the events occur. We try to avoid bad experiences as opposed to simply responding to things that happen to us or around us.”

“Also, we will – if we make the investments necessary – create a resilient system, a defensible system, but it will never be a perfectly secure system, meaning that these systems do not defend themselves. We must actively participate in their defense, and that defense needs to be a collective defense, one where each of us makes contributions to the defence of all of us.”

Defending what results in this space as a series of crucial functions upon which our societies depend must be an international effort, where we have a social contract among nations that establishes: how we collectively make the investments required to create resilience in this space; how we collectively make contributions to defend what then results in this space as a series of critical functions?

Principal Deputy National Cyber Director Kemba Walden expressed her opinion that cyberspace activity is high and emphasized the need for an all-hands-on-deck strategy when dealing with ransomware.

All nations and communities, according to Walden, must contribute to the answer. Regarding how it relates to cryptocurrencies, she noted that ransomware is not particularly novel and that it was not created as a result of the early development of cryptocurrencies or even blockchain technology. She also emphasized that people use prepaid cards to carry out ransom.

She stressed that there is a need to increase the costs of doing business and raise the entry of doing business as a ransomware actor so that it becomes less profitable and more difficult to do, which impacts criminal activity. She claimed that the costs of operating as a ransomware actor are far too low.

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