Uwaje warns of cyber-induced meltdown

Regional Director for D-Link West Africa, Mr. Chris Uwaje has advocated that cybercrime and cybersecurity challenges should be accelerated to become the critical mass of Nigerians daily lives.

He warned that as the global financial meltdown deepens the key players would try to outsmart themselves by playing hide-and-seek of looted economies, especially online.

Speaking on the meltdown at the weekend, Uwaje said that similarly, digital savvy and electronic criminals would continue to search and smoke-out the loots, and unsecured green notes around the globe.

Developing counties such as Nigeria, he said, would remain venerable, unless urgent and smart steps are taken, describing the current meltdown as having similarity with cyberspace menace.

“The current global meltdown means different things to different people, just as cybercrime and cybersecurity mean different things to different governments,” he declared.

According to him, the bailout adventure may lead nowhere for Nigeria, unless multi-parallel actions of leadership political will for re-designing, rebuilding and fortifying our National Information infrastructure (NII) as well as building commensurate Information Society code-warriors are taken seriously simultaneously.

Based on his personal evaluation and analysis, cybercrime and cybersecirity activities will increase by about 53 per cent in the next half decade (2010-2015).

His projection is partly derived from lessons learnt from Bernard Madoff gate, assumed to be the largest fraud schemes in history.

Today reality, Uwaje said, is that many investment businesses are doing badly and will go down, but not before they deal a damaging blow to their victims.

This, he noted, is against the backdrop that the 70-year-old former Nasdaq Chairman committed such a colossal fraud of about US$65billion and plead-bargained his guilt to only 11 felonies, ranging from wire fraud and money laundering to stealing from pension plans and making false fillings to Securities and Exchange Commission.

Justifying his position, Uwaje emphasize that this fraud of one US American citizen committed in about two decades may surpass what African 419ners may not be capable of pulling off in 200 years.

“To crown it all, it must be said that the Bushy aspect of the global Meltdown is reflected in the financial recklessness of the Iraq War of approximated a billion US$ per day,” he said.

On the central role of Information Technology in the inter-play of global meltdown, he outlined some advice including strengthening federal leadership on cyber security, declaring that cyber infrastructure should form a strategic asset and establishment the position of national cyber advisor who will report directly to the president and will be responsible for coordinating federal agency efforts and development of national cyber policy.

Government, he said, should initiate a safe computing research and development (R&D) effort and harden the nation’s cyber infrastructure, thus supporting the development of next-generation secure computers and networking for national security applications.

“Work with industry and academia to develop and deploy a new generation of secure hardware and software for our critical cyber infrastructure,” he said, stressing that protecting the IT infrastructure is likely to keep America’s economy safe alongside other economies affected by the meltdown.

Advocating that they should ensure partnership with the private sector to establish tough new standards for cyber security and physical resilience, pointing out that the aforementioned represented a structured roadmap of conscious nations with knowledge economic thinking caps and seriously addressing as well as mapping out the strategies for the future survivability of their nations.

“Now, the problem and concern for a developing nation with porous IT-structures like Nigeria, is that, the more the hide and seek of the global meltdown, the more electronic criminals (e-criminals) are going to set sailing,” he cautioned.

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