Embrace .ng Domain for Cyber Security-NiRA

Nigeria internet Registration Association (NiRA) has renewed its bid to ensure more Nigerians and organization register and host their online presence on the .ng domain as efforts to ensure security of e- mails as well as reducing all the fraudulent traffic credited to Nigeria online.

The issue resonated at the 6th annual general meeting (AGM) of the Association held in Lagos on Wednesday, as the Association maintained that the domain is as secured as others across the world.

Similarly, Mary Uduma, NiRA’s president, reiterated that August, 2014 deadline for all Government Ministries, Departments and Agencies to migrate to the government domain of .gov.ng for all government internet activities and official businesses remains on course.

Uduma, who spoke with newsmen at the AGM held in Lagos, said that official email addresses ending in .gov.ng are much more secure than those addresses obtained from the freely available internet services.

She enunciated that most of the fraudulent mail traffics credited to Nigeria are actually not from the country but because there was no official domain and most of the MDAs use free domain, the email addresses could be easily hijacked and used fraudulently.

According to her, if the traffic emanating from Nigeria were contained in the secured government domain of .gov.ng, the activities of the internet criminals could be reduced to the barest minimum, as it is safer, adding that as most of the offices are in unsecured domain it is thus difficult to defend any allegation against Nigeria on fraudulent internet activities.

Uduma hinted that that  more than “40,000 .gov.ng email accounts have been created for all principal officers, permanent secretaries, heads of paratstatals, directors and other management staff of various MDAs and new easy to remember domain names being created. This will allow affairs of the site to be run more securely within the national domain space.

NiRA targets up to 250,000 domains hosting for the year 2013, but, according to Uduma “The Migration recorded was impressive as over 5o% of the set target was achieved. She however noted that” The August deadline for all MDA to migrate is not changing.”

To however guarantee secured platform on the .ng domain and security on the internet space, various international training programmes were exposed to Nigerians even as Uduma mentioned Domain Name System Security Extension (DNSSEC) training for the internet body fix for Abuja.

According to the NiRA president, “The Domain Name System Security Extension (DNSSEC) training can strengthen trust in the Internet by helping to protect users from redirection to fraudulent websites and unintended addresses. The DNSSEC training coming up in July in Abuja is organised by NiRA for Nigerians”.

Corroborating Uduma’s views, Akinbo Adebunmi, acting chief operating officer (COO) of NiRA, said, they do more on sensitisation of Nigerians on the importance of registering locally accordingly, even as he stated that it is a means of overcoming the fear to migrate to the country code domain name

“The .ng platform is as secured as any international platform, so we encourage all Nigerians to register their names, company or business names, emails and websites on the .ng. Since its introduction in April last year, the .ng has brought the recognition of the international body, Internet Corporation For Assigned Names And Numbers (ICANN).

“We intend to have road shows, exhibitions and award of excellence as well as have 100,000 Nigerians registered to mark the centenary anniversary of the country, as a way of creating awareness to the general public.” Akinbo said.