Cybersecurity Awareness and Tips for Nigeria
SCIENTISTS and inventors toil day and night to discover or invent a tool/product that will advance the cause of humanity and before you say Jack, criminals with the motive to perpetuate nefarious activities have tailored that same invention. There are so many criminals out there in Cyber and real world’s. Cyber crime or Cyber warfare transcends physical boundaries and as such erecting perimeter fencing offers no help.
Recently news filtered in that names, addresses, bank account details etc of some serving and retired personnel of Nigeria’s State Security Service was published online. This is no doubt a national embarrassment and a threat to National Security. It is plausible that a disgruntled member of staff could have done it.
Cyber criminals deploy ‘social engineering’- the art of cleverly influencing people- to outsmart and swindle their unsuspecting victims.
Some of the fantasies we read in science fiction novels or watch in James Bond movies that seem impracticable are now common place.
Sequel to the advent and penetration of internet and automatic teller machines, Nigerians must brace up for increased levels of cyber and financial crimes. It is not impossible to clone ATM cards, clone a website, hack into or completely take a website down. Cases abound in the Western world of criminals installing very tiny cameras on automatic teller machines to capture the PIN numbers of unsuspecting bank customers.
As we strive to catch up with technological innovation in advanced countries, we also need to brace up to the challenges inherent with such technologies. The following comprehensive guide and tips are geared towards making us conscious of the dangers out there and what to do to protect ourselves.
Be careful what you do on a computer especially a public computer like the so-called cyber cafes. When you use a public computer or the so-called cyber cafes to check your emails, ensure you uncheck the ‘’keep me signed or logged in’’ box before you sign in to your online accounts. Failure to do this means your email/online account can still be opened even after you sign out. It’s also easy for criminals to install key-loggers in public computers that secretly records information of users. It goes without saying that one must avoid using public computers or networks for financial and private transactions.
Don’t presume because you have deleted information from a computer therefore it cannot be retrieved. Bad guys beware! There are forensic tools that can be used to scan and recover deleted information from a computer.
Take heed the type of website you enter your personal information. Websites can be cloned. The website you thought is your bank’s, may not be after all. It’s safer to personally enter the URL (Universal Resource Locator) of the website you want to visit on the address bar than to Google it. It is risky to click on every link emailed to you by friends etc. Scrutinize emails claiming to emanate from your bank, PayPal and other financial institutions. Don’t give out personal information over the phone unless you are sure of the caller.
Be wary of text messages or even calls supposedly originating from a particular phone number or company you think you are familiar with. Often people get phony text messages telling them they have won a lottery that they never entered for. If it looks too good to be true, it is! A chap approached me lately telling me he got an email telling him he won the American Visa lottery and that he was asked to wire money via Western Union to a United Kingdom address. Without reading the content of the email, I told him it was definitely a fraud because the United States Department of State no longer sends emails to lucky winners of its Visa lottery. Winners are now required to personally check in www.dvlottery.gov whether they won or not.
People must desist from giving out their phone numbers indiscriminately. Youth Corper’s etc beware giving out your PERSONAL phone numbers to be published in ‘’Corper’s Magazine’’!
With bulk SMS and internet text messaging, one can send a text message with a personalized user I.D or phone number purporting to be someone else or originating from a specific phone number. For example, criminals can send you a customized bank transaction Debit SMS alert purporting to emanate from your bank and anything can happen from there.
Voicemail and phone calls can be hacked, too. Justice Salami has had a running legal battle with OyinloIa/the PDP over alleged text messages and calls purported to have transpired between him and an ACN gubernatorial candidate. One is not necessarily holding brief for Justice Salami, just to highlight the possibilities of technology. The case is still in court; let’s see how it pans out.
Computer/Phone hacking is a global phenomenon. Lately, United Kingdom’s widely read tabloid- the News of the World —closed shop over phone hacking scandal. Prominent celebrities have had their phones, twitter, email accounts etc hacked into at one point or the other.
Please if you use a wireless internet subscription on your PC or mobile device, it is very important you use a very STRONG password to protect it otherwise just about any body within your vicinity can log or hack into your network and use it. With ‘’remote log in’’, somebody can hack into your Personal Computer via your unsecured network and access all the information on your PC or device.
You cannot exonerate yourself if your network is inadvertently used to perpetuate negative acts. Always switch off the Bluetooth on your computer or mobile device because it is an easy gateway to the information in your device. Your voicemail too needs to be password-protected.
Use ‘strong’ passwords and change it as frequently as possible. Eschew using such things as your date of birth etc as passwords. Mix letters, numerals, and capital and lower case letters if possible. If you fancy it, try using a memorable sentence for a password. E.g. ‘’AbujaIsTheCapitalOfNigeria’’. Take note that the aforementioned password has every word starting with a capital letter. Yes, it’s a long one but also easy to remember. Most importantly, it is STRONG, and cannot be easily cracked.
Be careful to whom you send or email your CV and important documents. This applies mostly to unsuspecting job seekers. I cringe whenever I see job seekers copying and pasting their resumes, degree results, passport photos, NYSC discharge certificates etc on genuine and giddy recruitment websites. ‘Identity Theft’ may not be big business here in Nigeria but it is a multi-billion dollar business in most Western countries.
As a job-seeker, alarm bell’s should ring in your head when you come across a company online claiming to be say, Shell and having an email address shell@yahoo.com . If indeed it is Shell, then their email address must match their website e.g shell@shell.com .
Be wary the type of information you leave on social networking sites such as facebook, twitter, beebo, hi5 etc. Be careful whom you allow as your ‘friend’ or socialise with on facebook et al. Recently a postgraduate student Cynthia Osokogu was brutally murdered in Lagos. She was alleged to have ‘met’ one of her assailants through Blackberry Messenger. You can see the hazard in blindly trusting people you come across on social networking sites. Over here, particularly amongst teens, there seems to be some kind of competition as to who has the highest number of ‘friends’ on facebook. People may not be who they claim they are on social networking sites. It’s easy to copy and paste or upload another person’s picture and claim to be that person. There is a lot of impersonation, make-believe and facade going on in Social Networking websites.
If you are travelling, why must you post/advertise it on a Social Networking website? You are unwittingly telling potential goons that you won’t be around.
People have lost jobs and precious career opportunities courtesy of inappropriate information they inadvertently posted on Social Networking sites. The just concluded London 2012 Olympics recorded athletes being booted out because of their tweets. Some of the information you innocently put on Social Networking sites today may come to haunt you say in 10-20 years time especially for those with political or leadership prospects.
On a related note, you unwittingly make your self a target or a suspect if you allow a wanted criminal or terrorist as your friend on a social networking site. Do I have to also say that these sites are very addictive! So many folks waste many productive hours on facebook et al. This is not to say that social networking is bad, not at all.
Please it’s high time you made good use of the ‘privacy settings’ on some of these social networking sites. The privacy setting allows you to decide for example if you want your full date of birth to show or for the public to see you.
Have manifold email addresses. You can dedicate one of the emails for social activities- networking etc. Another one can be for your financial transactions and may be a third one for career-related transactions. The raison d’être for this is that if the email for social activities is compromised, it will not affect the sensitive information in your career or business emails.
Phone browsing has more security implications (not quite secured) compared to browsing on a typical desk top or laptop computer. Several times folks complain that their email accounts have been hacked into or compromised but on closer scrutiny one finds out that they have at one time or the other, accessed their email accounts on their phones. It often happens that cookies, malwares and Trojans may have infiltrated the said email account and will automatically start sending phony emails to all the addresses in the person’s contacts list.
It is not news that most of these Smart phones available today have software’s or applications that can track their owner’s geographical location. Nigerians like to flaunt their wealth and gadgets; we just like to rub it in. It may interest you to know that Google officially admitted that more than 90 per cent of android phones have mobile software’s with serious security vulnerabilities. Install a mobile security antivirus on that your smart phone.
Talking about phone tracking, the late Col Gaddafi was alleged to have placed a call via a satellite phone shortly before he was killed. The hypothesis suffices that his call was intercepted and the coordinates of his location was extrapolated. With such phones, the origin or location of the call can be tracked in real time.
So before you start flaunting that your latest toy, take time to consider its security implications.
Remember that each computer/phone or whatever device you connect to the internet have a specific I.P (Internet Protocol) address. There is a tendency that your I.P address is embedded in an email or online transaction that originates from you. With the I.P address, the location or the nearest telecommunication mast where that particular transmission emanates from can be deduced.
Please don’t drag this thread into the promise of altering or hiding an I.P address; using a ‘Virtual PC’ to browse or ways around some of these things. This thread is aimed to dissuade the bad guys.
Recall that most of these insurgent or terrorist groups in and outside Nigeria issue their Press statements online and have online presence hence they cannot afford not to leave an online ‘’fingerprint trail’’ no matter how meticulous or IT savvy they are.
Regularly updating your computer also makes it more secured. Similar to this is also to update your web browsers as older versions may be riddled with security flaws. Uninstall programs or software’s you no longer use from your computer. Avoid downloading or opening programs/files if you are not sure of the site’s authenticity or credibility.
Don Okereke, a Security Analyst & Consultant, wrote from Abuja, Nigeria
Source: Nigerian Guardian News
