By Adekunle Adekoya

THE telecommunications revolution that took place in Nigeria in the last 10 years helped in no small measure to make Nigeria and Nigerians at home part of the emergent world information society. Connected to the rest of the world through the GSM networks that started operating in 2001, unputdownable Nigerians soon found themselves on the information super-highway as telephony powered IT penetration and the internet started becoming ubiquitous.

Cybercrime

On the heels of this welcome development came the unwelcome; cyber criminals in the form of internet fraudsters and scammers sprouted like mushrooms, and their activities helped in no small measure to impact negatively on the image and profile of Nigeria and Nigerians outside the country. That, however, is not to say that cyber criminals do not exist elsewhere; they do, and in fact are more sophisticated than those from here, as the effects of hackers’ activities have shown in the advanced countries.

‘Hacktivities’

As a result, names like Kevin Mitnick and Julian Assange of WikiLeaks fame are now known worldwide because of their “hacktivities”. Even big name corporations with sufficient resources have not been immune from the activities of hackers; recently Sony Corporation counted losses in millions of dollars as a result.

On Monday, sporting gear maker, Adidas, took its website content offline after suffering what it described as a “sophisticated, criminal cyber_attack”. The firm said it was taking down the affected sites to protect visitors.

At the beginning of this month, the main phone network in the West Bank and Gaza suffered attacks by hackers, according to Palestinian Authority spokesman, Ghassan Ghatib, who said the attacks started in the morning and came from multiple sources around the world.

Perhaps the biggest of all was the one that happened to the websites of the Israeli defence organizations. On Sunday, the websites of Israel’s domestic intelligence agency Shin Bet and that of Mossad crashed in a suspected cyber attack by ‘hacktivists’ Anonymous.

The crash came two days after a warning, posted on Youtube in the name of the hacker group, Anonymous, which said it would retaliate after Israel stopped two vessels carrying activists and journalists to Gaza.

A spokeswoman for Shin Bet, according to the Mail Online said: ‘We can confirm that the website has been down for several hours and an investigation is ongoing. Initial investigations conducted by Tehila, the Internet company, indicate problems with the website servers.’

Are we prepared?

Again, here at home, not a few people in recent times have fallen victim of the activities of hackers, as many email accounts have been compromised and messages sent to third parties ostensibly by the victim. If the big-name corporations and dreaded organizations like Shin Bet and Mossad can fall victim of cyber attacks, then there is much to be apprehensive about as we move forward into the information society.

The question is: How prepared are we, as a nation? I hope the National Assembly is reading, for we need a comprehensive law for the ICT arena, which will take care of cybersecurity and cybercrime, and every other thing that has to do with ICT, including e-payment, mobile money, etc.