The American Business Council (ABC) has unveiled its cybersecurity hub, which aims to foster awareness and equip Nigerians and others with skills to combat the growing threat of cyberattacks.
The event to unveil the hub, though held virtually, saw key stakeholders discuss solutions to mitigate cyber threats in Nigeria and by extension, across the continent.
The CEO/Executive Secretary of ABC, Margaret Olele, announced that registration for the hub’s training programme will begin in January 2024, adding that link will be shared through social media and media houses.
Addressing the skills gap, a network and security solution architect, Chukwudi Theodore, who was one of the speakers highlighted the urgency of tackling the cyber skills gap and said that this year alone, they trained 2,550 on Neta Card, on ‘skill for all’ which is learn a skill, they train 7,000 persons in West Africa.
Keynote speaker Deputy Director Communications at the office of the National Security Adviser, Dr. Bala Fakandu, emphasised the need for affordable and accessible security tools to protect both startups and established businesses. He cited the alarming number of attacks on Nigerian enterprises, including healthcare agencies, Bet9ja, and Momo payment services, highlighting the significant financial losses caused by cybercrime
Fakandu stressed the importance of making cybersecurity solutions affordable and accessible, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises. He commended the establishment of the cybersecurity hub as a crucial step towards building cyber resilience and bridging the skills gap.
He stated: “Nigeria’s digital landscape placed hope of startups as they keep springing up, businesses wave into tech networks and the calls for e-commercial quickens the development of our country. Today, Nigeria has over 400 striving startups, growing at an annual rate of 35 per cent and also, and we have over two billion in funding for the startups as well which is an approximation that can be more than that, to be honest, similarly, there are over four million micro-small and medium enterprises in Nigeria, several of which are exploited online because they rely on a lot of online platforms to raise their businesses. This is because such enterprises want to grow, however, cyber criminals are also actually exploiting digitally and our acceptance is the use of digital platforms to perpetrate their crimes as well for various reasons.
“Unfortunately, the exorbitant cost of cyber defense continues to kill the progress in this perspective, this underscores the need to ensure the resilience of digital platforms and access to tools for the security of our systems at affordable costs that is the reason this topic is very germane that is ‘affordability and accessibility’ ways to incorporate cyber defense infrastructure or cyber defense expenditure in particular. In July 2022, one of our infrastructures in one of the states’ contributing healthcare management agencies had a data breach where information of all subscribers was dumped on the dark web. We identified that and were able to resolve that issue on good terms. We can recall the ransom which attacked Bet9ja in 2023 and Momo payment services breach of May 2022, which led to an approximate loss of over $15 million.”
