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Nigeria is Ripe for Institute of Cybercrime Monitoring-Uwaje

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Dr. Chris Uwaje, is president of Global Network for Cyber Solutions (Organisers of the Conference) and first vice president of the Institute of Software Practitioners of Nigeria (ISPON). He is also managing director of Connect technologies Limited. A valuable asset to the ICT industry, Uwaje is a well sought after speaker globally and consults for the federal government on a number of projects. Uwaje spoke to chike Onwuegbuchi

Cybersecurity Summit
First, let me congratulate Nigeria CommunicationsWeek for coming out with a very educative and informative concept in what I would call ‘technology reporting,’ which has been missing over the last decade. What we have around generally is regular reporters and they cannot be blamed because they have not being exposed to technology reporting skills. That is why I want to congratulate you for being different. Now, to your question about what informed the cybersecurity conference or my initiative with respect to involvement in cybersecurity; it dates back to 1999. Consequently, with my project leader initiative as a consultant for the First Bank Nigeria PLC, as a software engineer, I saw a lot of vulnerabilities in the daily operations and when I had the opportunity in year 2000 to pioneer the National Policy Transformation of Technology, I was privileged to have incorporated cyber police units as far back as 7 years ago. The issue of cybersecurity that has now taken centre stage globally – it is not just about the security content but it is about the sovereignty of the community of people.
That is why the issue of cybersecurity is very important. As we speak, I am dealing with a cybersecurity issue here; I have been communicating with some cyber criminals who are posing as a friend of mine. They say he is stranded in a 5 Star hotel somewhere outside Nigeria and has lost his international passport and need some money, I have been trying to make them give me a bank account number where l will make the payment but they have insisted that I send the money through Western Union Money Transfer. This communication started about 2 weeks ago; these miscreants hijacked the email of one of my friends. What they do is send a message saying that your Yahoo! account is being reconstructed and you should renew your identity and password. Once you do that, they hijack that mail box and you cannot have access to it anymore. Now they begin to operate with that mail box and some people fall prey to their schemes. This is about technology and Nigeria has what is called technophobia syndrome. Nigerians are very shy of technology; it is not their faults because Science and Technology has been on the downturn. If it had been upground, the issues we are facing today would not have been strange. So, there is need to involve Science and Technology contents in our everyday lives.
It is very important to ensure that Nigerians understand what technology is. Nigerians have created a fallacy of technology definition; it is not just computing, aeronautics, automobile, electronics; these are the products of technology. Technology is the concept and process that creates the product; so we should concentrate on the core content of technology. But we neglect the process and go for the product only and that is why about 80% of what Nigerians consume is imported, and with such a scenario, it shows that we are not creative entities.
Fighting Cyber Criminals
The issue really is that there are two ways Nigeria can get herself set. One of the ways is the institution of critical infrastructure and of course, massive capacity building for knowledge workers and ‘code warriors.’ For Nigeria to be prepared in terms of dealing with the cyber criminality of the world it needs to produce a reserved pool of nothing less than 1 million code warriors from our tertiary institutions, secondary and primary schools, as well as industry. Because e-Government has to be protected, businesses have to be protected; even our cultures have to be protected. What we are witnessing today is no different than what our ancestors witnessed about 500 years ago. Technology has the centre stage today. Some people believe that Slave Trade is just about the ship, the cargo and the Whiteman. That is not so. What is at the centre of Globalization, which is Slave Trade 500 years ago, is the compass – the face of technology. Ideally, without the compass, those sailors of that time would not have ventured into the seas. So, the centre of globalization has always been technology. Indeed, technology is another word for the internationalization of trade and commerce. So, the cell phone of today has security content for Nigerians; the computer of today has security content for Nigerians; the Internet of today has greater security content for Nigerians; and there is going to be more ferocious attacks on this sub-region. We learnt that during the time of the 9/11 attacks, Al-Qaeda used some of the IP addresses within Nigeria to wreak some havoc. So, we should be prepared. It is important and paramount – above all, professionals should be put in place to engage these cyber criminals that are almost ruining us.
If Nigeria knows IP and cybersecurity issues, they should domicile them at the footstep of the professionals in the CPN, the NCS and Atcon. These are people who have been trained in the area of informatics and information technology development; they should be the experts advising Government. How can we have a nation that does not have an IT adviser to the president? And you want to safeguard your country from digital attack. There must be a special assistant to the office of Mr. President, who would be a senior adviser on information technology. These are the things that need to be put in place in the Federal Republic of Nigeria, which is very strategically imperative that we need to do as fast as we can. There is no reason why we should not have an Institute of Cybercrime Monitoring; there is no reason why we cannot have Cyber Engineering in our institutions; there is no reason why we should not inculcate the cybersecurity curriculum from primary school upwards. Just the same way we used to have the civic lessons of the old, cybersecurity and cybercrime can be introduced at the primary and secondary schools levels.

Local Software and Patronage
I have spoken about technophobia. First, let me point out the difference between indigenous software and local software. The former are those that are developed and politically managed and supported by Nigerians, for Nigerians without the transfer of foreign exchange. Whereas foreign software is one hundred percent transfer of our local currency, in other words, this transfer does not have the potential of capacity building. We are creating jobs and labour for other people externally. It is the duty of every nation to protect its indigenous software. I can put it to you that there is no software that is developed for external use; they are developed for resolution of the challenges in the immediate environment. It is technophobia and a fallacy to say that foreign software is better than indigenous one. It is sheer ignorance and a lot of people do not understand software because it is an intangible thing that one cannot see. But they buy computer; now they are saturated with hardware and they then see that the hardware itself has not solved their problems and they are still where they are. There is a difference between computerization and automation. They must automate and that is when the software starts to drive them. When we say foreign software, we are talking about application software and services; not system software because that is still far away. There are lots of services that Nigerians can render as outsourcing entities to fellow Nigerians and other African countries, much better than people from elsewhere. An example is our payroll – our payroll was based on our state and national structure and foreigners from India and the U.K are finding it difficult to sell payroll here because their own structure had informed the development of their software. They were developing for their region. Digital colonies would be built this century and the way they are going to build it is to take control of the software engines that run the lives of the entire people of a community, nation or sub-region. That is why we are passionate when we say that ISPAN needs grants – Government grants, individual grants, if you take say, ten companies today and tell them to give us a software that can run in Nigerian banks in about six years from now, I can assure you that that can be done. That is what other countries do; they create what is called ‘failed projects’ in software development and when these projects are done, people learn from them because they can always experiment. We shy away from research and development in software because nobody is ready to invest. It is high time our Governments understand the imperative of indigenous software and also know that Nigerians are capable of producing world-class software.
In fact, a lot of Nigerians are working in laboratories abroad. If they can do that there, why can they not do same here? ISPAN has been campaigning and of course, it has yielded a little result by ensuring that we created IT departments in the ministries as a pilot. We have gotten a circular from the last regime that indigenous software should be considered before any foreign one for use within government departments. We have an agreement with Government that 50% of the cost of every foreign software imported into this country should be charged as a tariff to check their influx into the country. There is a lot of software – the core banking applications, among others, that have failed in this country. Nobody talks about them and Nigeria is losing money. The cost of these failed software is enough to build software institutes, is enough to provide superlative employment for software code warriors all over the country.


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Our 2023 Ads Safety Report

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By Duncan Lennox, VP & GM of Ads Privacy and Safety

Billions of people around the world rely on Google products to provide relevant and trustworthy information, including ads. That’s why we have thousands of people working around the clock to safeguard the digital advertising ecosystem. Today, we are releasing our annual Ads Safety Report to share the progress we’ve made in enforcing our advertiser and publisher policies and to hold ourselves accountable in our work of maintaining a healthy ad-supported internet.

The key trend in 2023 was the impact of generative AI. This new technology introduced significant and exciting changes to the digital advertising industry, from performance optimization to image editing. Of course, generative AI also presents new challenges. We take these challenges seriously and will outline the work we are doing to address them head-on.

Just as importantly, generative AI presents a unique opportunity to improve our enforcement efforts significantly. Our teams are embracing this transformative technology, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), so that we can better keep people safe online.

Gen AI Bolsters Enforcement 

Our safety teams have long used AI-driven machine learning systems to enforce our policies at scale. It’s how, for years, we’ve been able to detect and block billions of bad ads before a person ever sees them. But, while still highly sophisticated, these machine learning models have historically needed to be trained extensively – they often rely on hundreds of thousands, if not millions of examples of violative content.

LLMs, on the other hand, are able to rapidly review and interpret content at a high volume, while also capturing important nuances within that content. These advanced reasoning capabilities have already resulted in larger-scale and more precise enforcement decisions on some of our more complex policies. Take, for example, our policy against Unreliable Financial Claims which includes ads promoting get-rich-quick schemes. The bad actors behind these types of ads have grown more sophisticated. They  adjust their tactics and tailor ads around new financial services or products, such as investment advice or digital currencies, to scam users.

To be sure, traditional machine learning models are trained to detect these policy violations. Yet, the fast-paced and ever-changing nature of financial trends make it, at times, harder to differentiate between legitimate and fake services and quickly scale our automated enforcement systems to combat scams. LLMs are more capable of quickly recognizing new trends in financial services, identifying the patterns of bad actors who are abusing those trends and distinguishing a legitimate business from a get-rich-quick scam. This has helped our teams become even more nimble in confronting emerging threats of all kinds.

We’ve only just begun to leverage the power of LLMs for ads safety. Gemini, launched publicly last year, is Google’s most capable AI modeI. We’re excited to have started bringing its sophisticated reasoning capabilities into our ads safety and enforcement efforts.

Our Work to Prevent Fraud and Scams

In 2023, scams and fraud across all online platforms were on the rise. Bad actors are constantly evolving their tactics to manipulate digital advertising in order to scam people and legitimate businesses alike. To counter these ever-shifting threats, we quickly updated policies, deployed rapid-response enforcement teams and sharpened our detection techniques.

  • In November, we launched our Limited Ads Serving policy, which is designed to protect users by limiting the reach of advertisers with whom we are less familiar. Under this policy, we’ve implemented a “get-to-know-you” period for advertisers who don’t yet have an established track record of good behavior, during which impressions for their ads might be limited in certain circumstances–for example, when there is an unclear relationship between the advertiser and a brand they are referencing. Ultimately, Limited Ads Serving, which is still in its early stages, will help ensure well-intentioned advertisers are able to build up trust with users, while limiting the reach of bad actors and reducing the risk of scams and misleading ads.

  • A critical part of protecting people from online harm hinges on our ability to respond to new abuse trends quickly. Toward the end of 2023 and into 2024, we faced a targeted campaign of ads featuring the likeness of public figures to scam users, often through the use of deepfakes. When we detected this threat, we created a dedicated team to respond immediately. We pinpointed patterns in the bad actors’ behavior, trained our automated enforcement models to detect similar ads and began removing them at scale. We also updated our misrepresentation policy to better enable us to rapidly suspend the accounts of bad actors.

Overall, we blocked or removed 206.5 million advertisements for violating our misrepresentation policy, which includes many scam tactics and 273.4 million advertisements for violating our financial services policy. We also blocked or removed over 1 billion advertisements for violating our policy against abusing the ad network, which includes promoting malware.

The fight against scam ads is an ongoing effort, as we see bad actors operating with more sophistication, at a greater scale, using new tactics such as deepfakes to deceive people. We’ll continue to dedicate extensive resources, making significant investments in detection technology and partnering with organizations like the Global Anti-Scam Alliance and Stop Scams UK to facilitate information sharing and protect consumers worldwide.

Investing in Election Integrity

Political ads are an important part of democratic elections. Candidates and parties use ads to raise awareness, share information and engage potential voters. In a year with several major elections around the world, we want to make sure voters continue to trust the election ads they may see on our platforms. That’s why we have long-standing identity verification and transparency requirements for election advertisers, as well as restrictions on how these advertisers can target their election ads. All election ads must also include a “paid for by” disclosure and are compiled in our publicly available transparency report. In 2023, we verified more than 5,000 new election advertisers and removed more than 7.3M election ads that came from advertisers who did not complete verification.

Last year, we were the first tech company to launch a new disclosure requirement for election ads containing synthetic content. As more advertisers leverage the power and opportunity of AI, we want to make sure we continue to provide people with the greater transparency and the information they need to make informed decisions.

Additionally, we’ve continued to enforce our policies against ads that promote demonstrably false election claims that could undermine trust or participation in democratic processes.

Overall 2023 Numbers

Our goal is to catch bad ads and suspend fraudulent accounts before they make it onto our platforms or remove them immediately once detected. AI is improving our enforcement on all these fronts. In 2023, we blocked or removed over 5.5 billion ads, slightly up from the prior year, and 12.7 million advertiser accounts, nearly double from the previous year. Similarly, we work to protect advertisers and people by removing our ads from publisher pages and sites that violate our policies, such as sexually explicit content or dangerous products. In 2023, we blocked or restricted ads from serving on more than 2.1 billion publisher pages, up slightly from 2022. We are also getting better at tackling pervasive or egregious violations. We took broader site-level enforcement action on more than 395,000 publisher sites, up markedly from 2022.

To put the impact of AI on this work into perspective: last year more than 90% of our publisher page level enforcement started with the use of machine learning models, including our latest LLMs. Of course, any advertiser or publisher can still appeal an enforcement action if they think we got it wrong. Our teams will review it and, in the cases where we find errors, use it to improve our systems.

Staying Nimble and Looking Ahead

When it comes to ads safety, a lot can change over the course of a year: the introduction of new technology such as generative AI to novel abuse trends and global conflicts. And the digital advertising space has to be nimble and ready to react. That’s why we are continuously developing new policies, strengthening our enforcement systems, deepening cross-industry collaboration and offering more control to people, publishers and advertisers.

In 2023, for example, we launched the Ads Transparency Center, a searchable hub of all ads from verified advertisers, which helps people quickly and easily learn more about the ads they see on Search, YouTube and Display. We also updated our suitability controls to make it simpler and quicker for advertisers to exclude topics that they wish to avoid across YouTube and Display inventory. Overall, we made 31 updates to our Ads and Publisher policies.

Though we don’t yet know what the rest of 2024 has in store for us, we are confident that our investments in policy, detection and enforcement will prepare us for any challenges ahead.


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InDrive Upgrades App, Announces New Safety Details

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InDrive, an e-hailing firm, announced app upgrades as well as new safety details for riders and drivers.

InDrive’s updated Safety Centre now allows its support team to contact a user’s trusted contacts in emergencies and the number of trusted contacts has been increased from one to five. InDrive says that it is also easier for its support team to share information with emergency services, among other things.

Also, the company said by clicking on the app’s SOS-button, users can see all the information needed when requesting help or reporting an incident – along with a button to call police or ambulance services.

InDrive’s app design has also been updated to improve user experience, making the Safety Centre more visible, it said.

Further, the company said: “inDrive is also testing photo sharing and automatic translation of chat messages, which have been added to the in-app chat function. These make it easier for the driver and rider to clarify the pickup point, and communicate in the same language while traveling.

“Passengers and drivers stay within the application when using these features, so there’s no need to use across other platforms, thereby protecting personal information. For now the feature is currently being tested by a limited number of users to improve its functionality before it is rolled out to everyone.”

The announcement today comes after the company recently revealed it had expanded its financing arrangement with General Catalyst to $146 million, allowing the company to engage in product upgrades, extend its service offerings, and enter new markets in Africa.


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NIN-SIM Linkage: Telcos to Bar More Phones Lines from March 29

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Telecommunications operators in the country are gearing up for another round of disconnections of phone lines for subscribers who have failed to link their National Identification Numbers (NIN) with their SIM cards.

NIN-SIM Linkage: Telcos to Bar More Phones Lines from March 29

The disconnection which will happen Friday, March 29, following a directive from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) requiring all registered SIMs lacking proper NIN linkage to be either corrected or completely disconnected from networks.

The ongoing process, which commenced on February 28, 2024, is part of the government’s efforts to curb criminal activities like banditry and kidnapping, contributing to enhancing national security.

There are indications of a potential third phase in April 2024.

Operators have reportedly cooperated with the NCC in executing the directive, affirming their commitment to national security objectives and assuring full compliance by the specified deadlines.

The second phase will target subscribers with five or more SIMs from a single operator lacking verified NIN-SIM linkages.

The third phase, set to commence on April 15, will focus on subscribers with four SIMs or fewer and unverified NINs.

While telecom companies seek a review and extension of the April deadline for the third phase, indications from the NCC suggest a steadfast adherence to the established timelines.

The first phase saw the barring of 40 million lines, comprising around 17 million active SIMs without NIN submissions and 23 million inactive SIMs lacking NINs over the past year.

 

 

 

 


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