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PKI Will Authenticate Data from Nigeria-Omotoso

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Bolanle Omotoso, country managing director/founder, Data Recovery Specialist Limited is is an experienced and highly skilled business technology consultant with specializations covering data availability, disaster recovery and prevention, digital forensic investigation services and consultancies, protection of information assets, and corporate fraud control.

Omotoso has led several turnkey ICT projects in Nigeria while heading the ICT department of his employers and as an entrepreneur.

He founded Data Recovery Specialist Limited in 2006 as the first professional data loss recovery company in Nigeria.

Omotoso spoke to peter ugwu on stakeholders’ expectations on Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) scheme campaigned for by the National Information Technology Development Agency (NiTDA).

Data Recovery Specialist Limited
Data Recovery Specialist Limited was established in 2006. What we have been doing centers on information security consultancy.

We are the West African foremost data recovery and computer forensic service company with accreditation to exclusively operate and carry on professional services as part of the Globally Networked Business offices of the world renowned, World-Best Repair & Service Company; Myung Information Technologies Company Limited, Korea.

I will make bold to say that with our state-of-the-art recovery laboratory in Lagos and the latest advanced recovery techniques, experienced technicians and the reliability clients would expect from a world class leader in recovery technology, we are the best in the industry.

We have been doing that through extensive research and development program; maintaining leading-edge expertise in all areas of recovery and computer forensics.

Developed Solutions
Data Recovery Specialist is internationally affiliated with other world renowned data recovery companies in USA, UK, India, South Africa & Russia.

We have live access to engineers in Korea every day, along with high-speed secured data communications link deployed for USA & European technical backup.

This allows us to tap into international resources and expertise 24 hours a day to effectively handle any data recovery, no matter the size or complexity.

Today, people talk about public key infrastructure (PKI), although it has been developed in Nigeria, but in our little way, we have been developing on that, helping companies achieve secured transaction processes.

PKI Concept and National Agenda
First of all, it is important that stakeholders support the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), in the effort to have a national PKI blueprint.

When operational, PKI will register Nigeria’s presence in the comity of digital economies, drawing attention to Nigeria’s readiness to tackle security threats associated with cyberspace. Everything is digitally done now.

So, as a country, if you fail to do your homework to secure your space, the international community will blacklist you from performing certain transactions that incorporate cyberspace.

 But when the PKI is operational, nobody will make gag of Nigeria again. It will seal the mouth of critics, because most companies at the international arena actually view their Nigeria counterparts’ processes as porous to attack and compromise.

PKI Implementation Channels
Anybody that does transaction, especially with international partners or a third party, needs PKI to move forward, achieve maximum authentication and security.

Whether you are in financial, telecom, oil and gas, shipping among other sectors, you need PKI.

The present Nigerian society is such that everything is going online; not just online, but on mobile, because the internet penetration is growing; the mobile money is there, cashless economy policy and host of other developmental agenda driven by information communications Technology (ICT).

All these things pass through certain levels of authentication. The reason sometimes somebody would want to send money to another person and it get diverted is because initially there was no authentication.

National Security Using PKI
National security management is all about identity management. It starts with being assured that the person you are dealing with at the other end is the right person.
For an instance, while leaving your home in the morning, right there at the gate you informed your  younger brother that someone is coming to pick up a particular item. Probably, someone was eavesdropping and approaches your brother later requesting for the item.

If there were no concrete mode of identifying the real person, your brother is likely to make mistake of giving out the item to the wrong person.

So, what PKI does is to confirm or authenticate people or parties involved in a transaction; it will curtail certain outrageous claims and legal tussles that ensue, especially after financial transactions.

Data security is paramount in whatever process we found ourselves, PKI will also help in ensuring confidentiality of data or information.

Meanwhile, none of the parties will feel surcharged, because the process would have been done in a transparent manner.

If parties agreed on one percent I can turn around tomorrow to say that was never our agreement, but because right from the initiation of the transaction everything was protected, there would be nothing to hold unto, unless for people with dubious minds.

Outsourcing of National Data Capturing Projects to Foreign Companies
Frankly speaking, when you want to improve on any project you have embarked upon, one of the things you cannot avoid is talking to people who have the expertise, those who have done such thing in the past and can tell of their experiences.

The essence is for you to learn from them-the pains and gains.

Through that knowledge you can then perfect your system.

When you asked outsourcing national data capturing processes to foreign companies, maybe you were referring to the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) project outsourced to MasterCard, whether we like it or not, we need to learn from others. Also, the people (Nigerians) working at the NIMC are professionals.

Those things you believe they have outsourced are based on the fact that they want the staff to learn from MasterCard. Not just that the company’s tools to carry out the project are based in Nigeria.

The systems they are using are made in Nigeria. That goes to show we believe in ourselves and products.

Even software, what you do not have, get it from whoever has it.

The lesson is for us now to focus our strengths on the developmental agenda that would grow innovations in the industry.

Today, we have an incubation centre for software developers; in the recent past there was nothing like that.

The country is on the right path to information development just that we need to speed up the process to meet with others. We have to learn how to develop our own.

Securing Nigeria
To secure Nigeria by way of making people become security conscious is very simple. If we take mobilization and advocacy attached to the HIV/AIDS scourge, one will discover that although it does not kill easily yet government at international and local fora harped on it.

Several NGOs came up as a result of the need to create HIV/AIDS awareness. Today, we have National Action Committee on AIDS and States have equivalent bodies, why not replicate that gesture in the issue of security consciousness.

We have to make such noise to enlighten people on security tips.
Some sectors are trying, but we need a national course on that. Banks are trying; they issue you with a Personal Information Number (PIN) code and warn you not to disclose it to another person.

There are nasty mistakes people make that can be corrected by way of security tips.

There is no message you get from banks without attached warning that you should not make available your PIN or password available to anybody.

Exiting Challenges
As we speak today, a lot of companies are rejecting data coming from Nigeria, just because they do not trust us.

The reason is not far-fetched; some of the data or mail that emanate from Nigeria are transferred in an unencrypted format and it gives the foreign partners concern.

Transferring information to that partner in an unencrypted format may reveal the data or information to the third party.

Those foreign companies are cautious about how their data are shared or circulated and would not permit any process that will compromise them.

Opening the channel to ‘unauthorized’ or ‘unwarranted’ party can lead to financial loss. Nigeria currently loses money to international organizations.
Why? During computer transactions you have to adopt solutions made abroad, even when such can be developed in Nigeria, which points to the none-existence of authorities that will regulate that in our country.

Solutions
What can be done is what NITDA is doing now, by coming up with a blueprint. I have gone through the document and it is a well elucidated document that makes bare how PKI operates.

The essential part of the project implementation should be on proper sensitization of stakeholders comprising users, businesses, organizations and others that will benefit from PKI scheme. 

The next thing is for NITDA to table the document before the National Assembly for proper legislation.

Once the NASS is convinced that the business class has accepted it, it will receive accelerated hearing, because this is tied to the success of majority of the nation’s economic agenda, like the vision 20:2020.


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EAIF Commits Additional US$30M to Support Indorama’s Expansion with Third Urea Plant in Nigeria

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The Emerging Africa Infrastructure Fund (EAIF), a Private Infrastructure Development Group (PIDG) company, has committed a US$30 million senior debt facility to Indorama, a leading producer and exporter of fertiliser.

The investment enables the construction of a new plant, port terminal, handling stations, and storage facilities in Nigeria, providing a major boost for the country’s agricultural sector, which is a crucial driver of the country and region’s economic growth.

EAIF acted as a co-lender within a broader debt financing package arranged by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), mobilising US$1.25 billion from a syndicate of impact investors, development finance solutions, and commercial banks.

EAIF’s investment increases the Fund’s lending to the company to $111 million, reflecting a joint-ambition to accelerate Indorama’s growth strategy and Nigeria’s aspirations for diversification and industrialisation.

The new funding unlocks fresh capital to enable the construction of a dedicated port terminal and state-of-the-art urea fertiliser plant, anticipating an increase in its current capacity from 2.8 million metric tons to 4.2 million metric tons per annum.

The expansion leverages the company’s strategic location as a freight-competitive supplier serving the needs of significant urea markets in the southern Atlantic, including Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, as well as West Africa, South Africa and the USA.

The facility bolsters Indorama’s capacity, extending its complex beyond the current two urea fertiliser plants, which is well poised to meet the entire demand of the Nigerian market.

The third urea plant aims to maximise output to meet the food demands of growing populations as disruptions precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine crisis affect food security around the globe.

Global crop production is reliant on the international supply of fertiliser. The landmark project is expected to position Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, as a leading producer of urea among the top 10 producers worldwide.

Contributing to the UN Sustainable Development Goals 8 and 9 on Decent Work and Economic Growth, and Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure, EAIF’s loan forms part of the Private Infrastructure Development Group (PIDG) objective for new infrastructure to drive action on climate and nature.

The construction of the port terminal and third plant is set to begin in 2024, with commercial operations expected to commence in 2026. During the construction phase, it is estimated that over 500 jobs will be generated, further contributing to economic development in Nigeria and beyond.

Commenting on the transaction, Olivia Carballo, Managing Director, Emerging Market, Fixed Income at Ninety One, the fund manager of the EAIF, said: “Our continued support for Indorama demonstrates EAIF’s commitment to harnessing the region’s significant economic prospects.

Africa’s potential for industrialisation is tremendous, and this landmark project is a testament to Nigeria’s enhanced ability to produce and export competitively priced, high-quality fertiliser to farmers in regional and international markets, which will remain a priority for years to come.”

Munish Jindal, CEO, Indorama, said: “Indorama will utilise state-of-the-art technology and adhere to stringent environmental standards to ensure optimal efficiency, product quality and sustainability.

We believe that the establishment of this fertiliser will position Nigeria as a key player in the global agricultural market. We are committed to maximising the potential of this project to benefit farmers, communities, and stakeholders across the value chain.

The involvement of esteemed lenders like the Emerging Africa Infrastructure Fund will not only help Nigeria’s in becoming one of the largest exporter of the fertilisers in the region but will also address the issues of global food security. We extend our sincere appreciation to all our partners, lenders, and stakeholders for their unwavering support and dedication to our shared vision.”

Sérgio Pimenta, IFC Vice President for Africa, said: “Reliable access to high quality fertiliser is essential for food production and food security around the world. IFC’s investment in Indorama, along with African, Asian, European, and American partners, signals our joint commitment to support the agriculture sector, Nigeria’s economy, and the expansion of Indorama, an important supplier in the global food chain.”


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Lifi.net Achieves 500mbps Speed to Rank among Fastest Internet Providers in Nigeria

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Lifi.net, a fast-growing internet service provider, has attained internet speed that is many times faster than the documented average internet speed in Nigeria as at January 2024.

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Latest disclosure by LIfi.net shows that the company now delivers up to 500 megabits per seconds (mbps) internet speed in unlimited services provided to homes and offices. This is higher than the country’s average internet speed of 26.74mbps.

As internet subscriber base increases in Nigeria and hit 161.68 million in January, the quality of internet service provided by operators to their users still constitutes concerns as 2G network which has limited speed dominates the space by covering 57.78%.

The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) revealed through its latest data that while 3G is responsible for 9.36% of internet users in the country, 4G covers 31.75% of internet access and 5G internet only serves 1.11% of internet users in the country.

This combination explains why Nigeria ranked 93rd on the global mobile internet speed test out of 144 countries tested by Ookla, a U.S-based internet speed analysis firm, in January, putting the country’s median internet speed at 26.74 megabits per second (mbps).

However, Lifi.net (NT/007/22), a licensee of NCC, is among few Internet service providers (ISPs) that deliver fastest internet speed in Nigeria with up 350mbps for homes and 2500mbps for offices while assisting new ISPs with speeds over 5000mbps at the data centre and delivering the capacity to their various hubs at no extra cost.

“For over five years Lifi.net has been a leading network company, providing quality internet solutions at the speed of light and at affordable rates. We have highly technical and hard-working personnel and partners. We are very skilled at managing Cisco and Mikrotik Routers’ deployment, configurations, and integrations, fibre laying, and splicing,” says Abraham Oluwambe, Chief Operating Officer of Lifi.net.

He added that as operators attract more subscribers to their respective networks, they should equally place a premium on upgrading the quality of services to deliver broadband at the fastest internet speed possible.

“Our services are not only widespread but also affordable. We believe in making quality connectivity accessible to all. We understand the importance of budget-friendly solutions. Our cost-effective broadband plans ensure you get the best value for your investment without compromising on quality.

“While providing high-speed and reliable broadband connectivity, operators may choose the floor or the peak performance of its service. At Lifi.net, we always go for the latter,” he said.


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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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