BY: Taiwo Adetiloye
When it comes to cybercrime and how Nigerians have been stigmatized globally, more often than not has created global concern and trust issues towards Nigerians.
However, this narrative does not truly reflect the correct attributes of who Nigerians are.
The majority of Nigerians population are hardworking, law-abiding and highly educated.
Cybercrime could include financial theft, breaking into another nation’s cyberspace or performing phishing scams etc. The rampant effects of Cybercrime nowadays will continue to increase as the capacity of internet users worldwide increases.
Thus, cybercrime should, therefore not be limited to a race, gender or particular regions or continent. cyberspace enables cybercrime to thrive and some malicious users can equally use the innocent identity of stolen profile to commit bad intentions.
Nigerians identities are sometimes used by malicious users to commit crimes in some cases.
Hence, there is the need to consistently educate people because the weakest link in cybercrime are untrained and uninformed humans. In addition, laws and public policies must be well defined to contain and prosecute outlaws.
Furthermore, some leading nations use cyberspace to their advantages.
Developed nations are known to use trained state-sponsored actors to sometimes spy and gather information, intelligence about other nation. such information could include military strength, confidential data owned by their targeted nation etc.
Trained cybersecurity experts called Blue hat Hackers and Grey hat Hackers work in between to troubleshoots and detect cybercrimes.
Thus, the difference between who the bad Hackers are, often known as Red Hat Hackers, and those trained professionals are really thin. Since they both know themselves quite well just that their intentions are different and they are both on different extreme end of the spectrum.
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Africa and third world countries engaged in such acts due to poverty and lack of opportunities.
Advanced nations engaged more in cybercrime mainly due to protective measures. Such protective measures include training their own citizens by encouraging them to pick up careers in cybersecurity and digital forensic investigation using AI etc. Thus, making them more resourceful and mitigate the troubles associated with cybercrimes.
As cyberspace continues to grow at an exponential rate. There would be a massive need for cybersecurity experts in the next coming decades, since bigger corporations will want to remain secure and also protect their integrity.
It is quite unreasonable that the issue of trust among people and nations when it comes to cybersecurity is not well channelled in the right direction.
Lastly, every nation has both good and bad citizens, Thus, not factoring the statistics of the good and bad citizens in one’s own country and targeting other nation could lead to a form of discrimination and racial profiling. This in itself should be discouraged from degenerating into another form of social inequalities.
Taiwo Adetiloye, BA & Diploma in Computer Science and MSc Cybersecurity – Public Policy (In view). He can be reached via tope.adetiloye@gmail.com.
