Expert urges cyber criminals to embrace tech career

A Lagos-based software engineer, Confidence Okoghenun, has urged cyber criminals to halt nefarious activities, and rather, embrace the various legitimate opportunities available in the field of information technology.

According to citation, cyber crime costs the global economy $600 billion in 2022. Cybersecurity experts have, however, predicted global cybercrime costs to grow by 15 per cent per year over the next five years, reaching $10.5 trillion yearly by 2025.

Speaking on the sideline at the Google I/O Extended Conference in Lagos, Okoghenun, who is Developer Advocate at Appsmith, stated that the activities of Internet fraudsters have ruined many lives worldwide. The programmer explained that while some of the fraudsters often give the excuse that they got into the fraudulent activity as a way of escaping from poverty, he averred that with the various opportunities that tech career offers, there is no better way to escape poverty than embracing a career in tech.

“If one could successfully plan and succeed in executing internet fraud, it means one is intelligent enough to learn one of the numerous skills available in tech, such as data analysis, data engineering, cybercurity, software engineering, product design, digital marketing, among others. The field is broad enough to accommodate everyone interested in burning the night candle to learn the rudiments. Aside from the monetary benefits that come with the field, the peace of mind it provides is unquantifiable. This is unlike the fraudulent activities of some of the cyber criminals, who must hide from being caught and arrested by security personnel.”

Delivering his talk on WebAssembly at the conference, Confidence explained to the attendees that “WebAssembly is a compilation target for other programming languages (C, C++, Python, Rust, Java), enabling the execution of these languages in a secure sandbox, either on the server or in the browser environment.”

Highlighting the benefits of the technology, Okoghenu explained: “WebAssembly also offers a beautiful interface for containerisation. Because all programmes executed in WebAssembly are completely isolated from the host, applications can be executed more securely (as they specifically need to request io, network and storage access), and deployed easily because all programme dependencies are contained in its modules. On this point, WebAssembly containers are more secure, faster and less resource intensive than today’s industry standard for containerisation technology.

“Perhaps, the best part of WebAssembly is that developers do not need to learn a new programming language to benefit from it. Since all major programming languages can be compiled into WebAssembly, developers can stick to the languages they know and love while benefiting from all the features that WebAssembly offers. It’s a win-win situation.”