Today’s edition of the Nigerian Army Resource Centre (NARC) Weekly Subject Experts’ Presentation for Friday, 10th February 2023, was held at Hall C, TY Buratai Block, NARC, Abuja. There was just a presentation made by the Subject Expert for South East Asia.
The presentation was made by Brig Gen SN Eze, Subject Expert for Southeast Asia. His presentation discussed the growing cyber crimes in Singapore. Singapore had lost $501 million to scams in the past year. Phishing, e-commerce, and investment scams were among the top five most common tactics used against victims through social media. To combat growing cases, the Singapore government has made effort to set up an anti-scam command who would harness resources in areas of scam investigation, incident response, intervention, and enforcement. Brig Gen Eze,
In his analysis for Nigeria, the FBI reported that the bulk of Internet crime originated from Nigeria in what is now known as 419 while others called it yahoo-yahoo fraudsters in Nigeria. Not to forget he mentioned that the introduction of modern technology gave rise to the huge outbreak of cybercrime ranging from Internet fraud, software piracy, hacking, Atm fraud among others. The senior officer further stated that the wild growth of cybercrime accrues to the high rate of unemployment, harsh economic conditions, bad educational system, the quest for wealth, and inadequately equipped law enforcement agencies among others.
In it implication on national security and defence, it has affected the country’s reputation, loss of bilateral trade options and also lost of foreign direct investment. Conclusively he charged the government that there is need to harness the National Information Development Agency (NITDA) and the NCC cyber security arms for proactive response to cyber incidence and also reviewing the cyber security Act of 2015. For individuals and organizations, he encouraged sit-tight cyber principles to neutralizer cyber threat thereby quelling this wild fire in the country.
Present at the briefing was the Director of Research, management staff, Senior Research Fellows and Research Fellows, Consultants, senior officers, and additional staff of the Centre.