Expert Urges Shift In Nigeria’s Data Strategy Amid N250bn Annual Loss

Cybersecurity professional, Victoria Ogunsanya has advocated a sweeping overhaul of Nigeria’s information safety technique, within the face of escalating cyber threats and an annual financial toll estimated at over N250 billion.

Ogunsanya warned that, until organisations undertake a extra proactive and intelligence-driven method to cybersecurity, the nation’s digital economic system might endure irreversible harm.

From high-profile information breaches in banking and authorities platforms to rising instances of ransomware and enterprise e-mail compromise (BEC), Nigeria is confronting a rising wave of cyberattacks concentrating on delicate information. In line with the Nigeria Cybersecurity Outlook 2024, these assaults are usually not solely extra frequent however more and more refined, leveraging synthetic intelligence, deepfake-enabled fraud, and Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS).

Ogunsanya, who can be the co-founder of TechNovelle, mentioned, cybersecurity is now not only a know-how problem, as it’s a enterprise survival and nationwide resilience problem. ‘Organisations should transfer from reactive to proactive fashions, embedding cybersecurity into core enterprise methods from day one,’ Ogunsanya averred.

She mentioned, the normal “perimeter-defense” method is outdated in in the present day’s cloud-driven, hybrid-work panorama, including that the shift should start with information visibility and classification, utilizing instruments like Knowledge Loss Prevention (DLP) to determine and tag delicate data, equivalent to Financial institution Verification Numbers (BVNs), well being data, and monetary information.

“Many Nigerian corporations don’t even know what information they’ve or the place it resides. You cannot defend what you don’t perceive. Correct classification aligned with the Nigeria Knowledge Safety Regulation (NDPR) is foundational,” Ogunsanya famous.

The NDPR, enforced by the Nigeria Knowledge Safety Fee (NDPC), alongside CBN’s cybersecurity frameworks and NITDA’s Knowledge Safety Impression Evaluation tips, now place appreciable compliance obligations on each private and non-private sector actors.

“The typical value of an information breach globally is now $4.45 million. IBM’s 2024 Price of a Knowledge Breach Report, including that for Nigerian SMEs and startups, even a fraction of that value might cripple operations,” Ogunsanya mentioned.

To bolster long-term resilience, Ogunsanya additionally level to the rising position of rising applied sciences equivalent to Synthetic Intelligence (AI) and Machine Studying (ML) for automated anomaly detection and fast menace response; safe Entry Service Edge (SASE) to guard cloud-based work environments and blockchain for immutable information audit trails in sectors like e-government and finance.