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Hacking - 'Country Has Cyber-Soldiers to Protect Its Cyberspace' [interview]Jul 11, 2011 (Daily Trust/All Africa Global Media via COMTEX) -- Dr. Chris Uwaje is the President of the Institutes of Software Practitioners of Nigeria (ISPON) and a former President of Cybercrime Network (CN). In this interview with Nahimah Ajikanle Nurudeen, he said government should rehabilitate cybercriminals and turn them into 'cyber-soldiers' to protect the country's cyberspace. The issue of hacking is of great concern to many people the world over, how can Nigeria tackle it? All those boys have the expertise and capacity to do that and without engaging them, we will continue to mop up the risk and that is where cybercrime comes to play. How do we establish institutes of technology and faculties of computer science and departments and we don't have the commensurate designs for the industry where the people are going to work, so what happens because they don't have a laboratory to practice, they exist in a vacuum, this vacuum is what leads to cybercrimes, because they don't have something to do than to play around with the computers instead of working because the industry is not growing. So, they now become cybercriminals that ply into all domains because they have time. The time they should be using working that is what they use to hack into computers and do havoc because they are rebelling against the society that has neglected them, a society that sent them to school without creating jobs. Those are the issues against a society that tells them lies, you know when they discuss at the National Assembly, politicians' scandal, money and they read it in the newspapers, they react by going into cybercrime. There are hackers; there are ethical hackers and all what not. What is the way out? As a past president of cybercrime network, we have seen what our youths are capable of but the good thing about it is that you can convert cybercriminals into secured employment workers who can safeguard our e-space. This could be achieved by creating a super layer of technology that can monitor the Internet Protocol (IP) of players, people whom are into these things and then create device to track them, you can now talk them and see exactly what could be done further for them as at when due. We need to rally and turn them into cold warriors because we need a lot of warriors in the future to fight. The problem is internalizing, you are fighting the people who are internally disrupting the systems and what do we do if external people are disrupting your system, what happens? So we must have a responsibility by turning those boys into warriors to protect our nation against the other people. So, we need capacity building, we need motivational speakers, government must be able to bring out about 100 professionals and send them to all states of the federation as IT motivational speakers in search of excellence to make sure that our youths' brain and restiveness can be converted into positive ways. Those are some of the issues the Federal Government should look into. The issue with IT is that it has come to change the world; it really changed the way we think, the way we work, the way we entertain and of course the way we live generally. That implies that every nation must prepare to engage IT and the impact that IT is going to leave on nations will of course impact on education, impact on the justice and also crime. Now, the question, how do we respond to these impacts? We must be able to establish some strategic imperatives that will ensure that we will be duly ready for those domains and many more of them so that we can tap into the environment, the risk and the opportunities. While we are tapping into the opportunities, we will be creating a blaze of ways for people who will probably create crisis for you. Those crisis points, like we saw in banking and finance such as the ATM fraud, if we don't create capacity and we don't build commensurate solution that are indigenous, those crises will continue because of the culture of ATM usage in Nigeria might be different from what you have elsewhere even when pin numbers are the same, some people expose their pin numbers while you are at their back and people tap into them and create enormous crises by stealing their money from the bank and of course we are doing e-transaction in this country without e-legislature, we don't have a national e-commerce policy and we are doing e-transaction. E-transaction encompasses e-commerce, trading and all that. So, we must be able to have a national e-commerce policy to be able to ensure that. Before we even go into that, government must realize that the impactful nature of IT is that one must be able to build a fortress of governance, that fortress of governance resides in e-government which must be designed indigenously. E-governance spans a lot of scope, we are talking of e-government that has Government to Government (G-G) processes with its foundation that is the tap root just like the sovereignty, just like your constitution then of course you cut that into Government to Business (G-B) by licensing people to do banking, transportation, licensing people to own businesses then you now have Government to Citizen (G-C) because at the end of the day, it is the citizens that are benefitting, it is the citizens that the government has the obligation to protect their lives and property according to the constitution. So, we must be able to form this as a network to ensure that there is a local area network then you go into wide area network of interfacing with the world and we must be ready. |