Commenting on the process of selecting the security influencers, James Moore, Editor, IFSEC Global said, the influencers are “Chosen based on nominations that was judged by a panel of highly respected judges, the influencers span several categories (six specifically for security), with nominees and winners coming from across the globe”.

“The awards are designed to generate positivity across the industry by recognising the talent and efforts of some of the leading individuals tirelessly working to develop the security and fire safety sectors”.

Meanwhile, Mr. Olufemi Ake ‘s nomination was on the top 10 security influencers in the Manufacturers / Vendors / Integrators / Installers category.

He is responsible for the growth within the West Africa region, spearheading ESET brand by opening access to strong, trust-based relationships with private and public sectors.

His team has championed various cybersecurity education programs at schools, large and small corporations, and public sector institutions to create awareness on the importance. He has also written numerous articles which often serve advice to IT professionals on ethics, compliance, risk and governance in corporate environments.

Mr. Ake is an experienced strategic business development and operations professional with more than 15 years of experience cutting across real estate, finance, fmcg and information technology sectors in the United Kingdom and West Africa markets.

ESET, a global Digital Security Company, originated from Europe. For more than 30 years, ESET has been developing industry-leading IT security software and services to protect businesses, critical infrastructure and consumers worldwide from increasingly sophisticated digital threats.

From endpoint and mobile security to endpoint detection and response, as well as encryption and multifactor authentication, ESET’s high performing, easy-to-use solutions unobtrusively protect and monitor 24/7, and updating defenses in real time to keep users safe and businesses running without interruption.

Reacting to the nomination, Mr. Olufemi Ake said that with over one billion users protected by ESET, it shows a great testament to the robust solutions and legacies products the company has built over the three decades ago.

“We have over a billion users that we secure globally currently. If you consider the fact that we have an agreement with Google to secure the backend of Chrome, you can deduce that with the number of Google Chrome users that amounts to over half a billion. So, we make bold to say that we have over one billion people that trust us to secure their devices. We are excited about this.

“This nomination couldn’t have come without the robust security of ESET. I want to specially thank the team at IFSEC Global for this recognition. ESET’s pledge to the customers in the West African region cutting across individuals, government, and private sector, continue on the journey with them towards complying with privacy and security regulations”, he said.

There are other nominees from Nigeria, namely; Daniel Adaramola and Samaila Atsen Bako.

• For fake recruitment campaigns, they used services like LinkedIn and WhatsApp.
• According to the US government, Lazarus is linked to the North Korean regime.

Jean-Ian Boutin, ESET Threat Research Director reviewed new campaigns perpetrated by the Lazarus group against defense contractors around the world between the end of 2021 and March 2022.

Lazarus targeted companies in Europe (France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, and Ukraine) and Latin America (Brazil) from 2021-2022, according to the ESET report. Despite the fact that the main objective of this Lazarus operation is cyber espionage, the group also tried to extract money from the prey, but without success. 

In Jean-Ian Boutin’s words: “The Lazarus threat group showed their ingenuity by implementing an interesting set of tools, including, for example, a user-mode component capable of exploiting a vulnerable Dell driver to write to kernel memory. This advanced hack was used in an attempt to bypass monitoring by security solutions”.

During 2020, ESET specialists had documented a campaign carried out by a Lazarus subgroup against European aerospace and defense contractors, ESET called Operation In(ter)ception. 

This campaign was notable in that it used social media, especially LinkedIn, to build trust between the attacker and an unsuspecting employee before sending them malicious components disguised as job descriptions or applications. 

At that time, companies from Brazil, the Czech Republic, Qatar, Turkey and Ukraine had already been attacked.

The ESET research team believed that the action was primarily aimed at targeting European companies, but tracking various Lazarus subgroups conducting similar campaigns against defense contractors, they soon realized that the campaign went much further. 

Although the types of malware used in the various campaigns were different, the initial modus operandi was always the same: a fake recruiter contacted an employee through LinkedIn and ultimately sent malicious components.

In this sense, the group continued with the same methodology as in the past. However, ESET documented the reuse of legitimate recruitment campaign elements to add legitimacy to their fake recruiters’ campaigns. Furthermore, the attackers used services such as WhatsApp or Slack in their malicious campaigns.

In 2021, the US Department of Justice charged three IT programmers with cyberattacks while working for the North Korean military. 

According to the US government, they belonged to the North Korean military hacker unit known in the information security community as the Lazarus Group.

Along with the new research from Lazarus, during the annual conference, ESET presented its report on “Cyber warfare past and present in Ukraine”. 

Also, Robert Lipovský, ESET researcher took an in-depth look at cyber warfare during Russia’s war against Ukraine, including the latest attempt to disrupt the country’s power grid using Industroyer2 and various wiper attacks.

Commenting on this subject, Mr. Olufemi Ake, the Managing Director of ESET West Africa (Anglophone), stated that: “The Lazarus group is a menacing Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) that must not be taken with levity. Its footprints in Africa are becoming more eminent and its tactics – more intelligent. It’s high time that organizations and government bodies adhered strictly to security compliance policies, and train employees on safe practices in the cyberspace.”

Alongside the ESET research team, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, former Commander of the International Space Station and a key figure in ESET’s Progress Protected campaign, joined ESET CEO Richard Marko to discuss the intricacies of the technology, science and life.

For more than 30 years, ESET has been developing industry-leading IT security software and services to protect businesses, critical infrastructure and consumers worldwide from increasingly sophisticated digital threats.

From endpoint and mobile security to endpoint detection and response, as well as encryption and multifactor authentication, ESET’s high performing, easy-to-use solutions unobtrusively protect and monitor 24/7, updating defenses in real time to keep users safe and businesses running without interruption.