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Expert Urges Awareness to Combat Electronic Fraud

By Chike Onwuegbuchi
18 March 2016   |   2:00 am
Oluseyi Akindeinde, chief technical officer, Digital Encode, and cybersecurity expert, a company that assist banks and other organizations to achieve PCI DSS certification, has urged them to...
CyberSecurity PHOTO: www.kpcb.com

CyberSecurity  PHOTO: www.kpcb.com

Oluseyi Akindeinde, chief technical officer, Digital Encode, and cybersecurity expert, a company that assist banks and other organizations to achieve PCI DSS certification, has urged them to intensify effort in educating customers as well as subscribers on the antics of electronic fraudsters.

This is as financial institutions as well as telecommunications operators have invested heavily in provision of adequate processes and technology required to combat hacking.

According to Akindeinde, “lot of the challenges faced by banks in fraud are still largely people related. The banks have pretty much taken care of the processes and technology. Bank’s information systems monitoring is at an all-time high now. Phishing however, is still prevalent in the financial industry as it targets the customers of these banks. As financial inclusion takes off, the fraudsters have also upped their game in this regard targeting unsuspecting customers. The only lasting solution to this is customer awareness and education.

He stated that Central Bank of Nigeria policies have helped a lot in combating electronic fraud especially the one targeting the use of ATM cards.

“One of such policies was the recommendation to banks to get certified to the global standard for payment system security PCI DSS. This has, by and large aided the banks in securing their platforms and technology to hackers and fraudsters. The ISO 27001 certification has also improved processes around the financial institution’s information security management. I would say it has cut down electronic fraud drastically and where there are still pockets of this can be traced and investigated,” he added.

Akindeinde noted that the global standard processes with different versions were brought about by the ever evolving and changing sphere of information security. It has updated a few of the objectives and added new controls in line with the current landscape of payment systems threats and risks. There are quite a number of advantages. One is that it makes application security testing a very key component of the overall process. Other key advantages include systems component inventory, third party and vendor relationships, advanced persistent threats and malware as well as physical access and point of sale security,” he stated.

He explained that, it will be highly beneficial for all banks to get certified to this new standard. “The PCI certification audit is a yearly process and as such it only makes sense to make adjustments where needed as it relates to the new version,” he said.

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