The Director Gener­al of the National In­formation Technol­ogy Development Agency (NITDA), Dr Isa Ali Ibra­him Pantami has decried the high rate of cyber-crime in the country disclosing that Nigerians lost about N159 billion to cyber secu­rity threats in 2013.
Pantami who stated this in Abuja during the inter-ministerial Technical Com­mittee inaugural meeting on the implementation of the
National Cyber security averred that research fig­ures indicate that out of about 97 million internet users in Nigeria, 14 percent suffer cyber-attacks and more worrisome is the fact that since 2014, the coun­try has been losing approx­imately N90 billion to cy­bercrime and in December 2015, Nigeria was the 17th most attached nation in the world based on threat intel­ligence drawn from Check Point Software Technolo­gies.
He explained that the Of­fice of the National Securi­ty adviser (ONSA) recently disclosed that of the 2,175 Nigerian websites hacked in 2015, 585 were govern­ment owned.
Reiterating the advantag­es of technology and also the ills prevalent in the society arising from the misuse and abuse of access to the tools of Information Technology, Pantami stated that “these Information Technological tools that have become vital in our critical activities are also avenues adopted by in­dividuals and groups to car­ry out a range of malicious activities”.