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Safer Internet Day Highlights Africa’s Online Challenge

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Yesterday the world marked Safer Internet Day, a reminder that emerging online issues like cyber bullying and harmful online experiences continue to pose a threat to users, especially, the youth.

Mobile telecommunications services provider Uswitch claims over half of 12 -15 year-olds have had some form of harmful online experience, one in eight young people have been bullied through social media, and 53% of 11-16 year-olds have seen explicit material online.

Uswitch has also found that six in ten parents are aware of the various technical tools and parental controls available, but only a third actually use them.

The company has emphasised the role of parental controls, which it explains is a set of measures and limits you can apply to your child’s internet devices and accounts to prevent access to upsetting or inappropriate content online.

Uswitch identifies several types of parental controls, including websites, smartphones, online gaming and streaming, which can be used to manage search engines, prevent money being spent online, keep track of your child’s location, to teach cyber safety habits and etiquette, and implement screen time limits.

Max Beckett, broadband expert at Uswitch.com says: “With the online world becoming increasingly intertwined with our children’s lives, parental controls should be a tool that all caregivers know how to use. Sadly, with only one in three parents currently using the controls available to them, there needs to be a better understanding on how to use them.

“It’s very easy to stumble upon harmful content on the web, so it’s natural that we would want to protect our children from that. However, parental controls are useful for much more. They give us the ability to teach our children how to use the internet wisely, and what is trustworthy or not — which are critical life skills in this day and age.

“While it’s frustrating that different devices and platforms all have different sets of parental controls, setting them up on as many devices as you can is the best way to plug all the gaps. It will help you ensure that your child can enjoy everything they want from the internet with minimal risks to their safety.”

Africa under attack

The message to do as much as possible to make the internet safer is amplified by market research from cybersecurity specialists like Check Point.

According to the Check Point Software 2022 Security Report, Africa experienced the highest volume of cyber attacks in the world last year. The company stressed that organisations and consumers must become more aware of the threats they face in the digital landscape.

During the past six months, Check Point Research has seen an increase in cyber attacks targeting the government, insurance, and finance sectors in South Africa.

The company adds that on average, there have been more than 1 450 attacks per week in the country.

“This trend will likely continue over the coming months as more threats start coming from cloud and mobile platforms. Threat actors will not limit their focus to South Africa and will potentially target countries across the continent,” says Check Point.

It points to the impact of cloud adoption in Africa and the emergence of supply chain attacks, as well as of remote workers and increasing concern over malware.

Check Point anticipates that these supply chain attacks will continue through 2023 with a significant amount of risk coming from the open source community.

“Typically, suppliers relying on these open source systems have not properly vetted them or have been lax in managing these environments, resulting in cybersecurity weak points emerging,” Check Point continues.

Globally, ransomware was the number one threat in 2022. Uncertainty across the various African economies around service delivery and critical infrastructure will likely see more countries face cyber attacks targeting the government.

According to Check Point, the number of cyber threats reported to the Kenyan National Cyber Crime Centre (NCC) in the first quarter of the 2022/23 year rose by almost 200%.

The Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) said the number of cyber attacks detected in the country in the three months ending September 2022 stood at 278 million. This is almost three times the number of threats reported in previous quarter.

The country has implemented a number of initiatives to strengthen its cybersecurity infrastructure, including the establishment of the National Cyber Security Authority and the National Computer Incident Response Team (National KE-CIRT/CC).

Their mandate is to coordinate response and manage cybersecurity incidents nationally and to collaborate with relevant actors locally, regionally, and internationally.

“There is simply no respite from ransomware and increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks. This puts users under increasing pressure to keep up to date with the latest trends in the threat landscape. We know that these criminals are continually evolving in how they develop and perpetrate attacks.

“With smaller, more agile malicious groups looking to exploit any potential weak points in company and end user defences, people cannot afford to not take cybersecurity seriously,” says Pankaj Bhula, Regional Director for Africa at Check Point.


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E-Business

NITDA Re-Echoes Commitment to Adopting Digital Transformation

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Kashifu Inuwa, the Director General of NITDA and the Ukrainian Ambassador to Nigeria, Ivan Kholostenko, during a courtesy visit to NITDA Corporate Headquarters in Abuja.
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In its continued commitment towards the implementation of the present administration’s Renewed Hope Agenda, particularly in the area of improving governance for effective service delivery, the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), is intensifying efforts to create a one-stop-shop portal for all government services.

The initiative aligns with the President’s directive to digitise 75% of government services by 2027, a target that is now actively being pursued by various stakeholders.

This was made known when the DG NITDA, Kashifu Inuwa CCIE and his team played host to a delegation from the Ukrainian Embassy in Nigeria led by its ambassador, Mr Ivan Kholostenko to the Corporate Headquarters of the Agency in Abuja to discuss possible areas of collaboration between the rwo countries on ways of enhancing productivity, transparency and trust in government processes.

Despite efforts made for several years at establishing a centralised e-government portal such as the OneGove.net, the NITDA DG noted that the Agency has been playing a pivotal role in shaping the design, standard guidelines, and implementation strategies towards its establishment.

He however stated that renewed commitment and extensive research into global best practices have reignited the drive for pursuing the agenda.

While stating that the Agency has been doing research on how other countries have been able to implement the unified digital government services platform, the DG said, “We have been doing research on how UK, Kenya and other countries have achieved this, so I believe we can learn from you as well to see how we can build our own.”

“While such models are not entirely transferable between nations, we can learn from their experiences to develop a framework that works for Nigeria,” he added.

Proposing an introduction of legal frameworks to back up the initiative, Inuwa disclosed that NITDA has identified multiple models from other nations that allows government agencies to provide services through an Application Programming Interface (API) while other countries provide services exclusively through designated portals backed by law.

“If we want to achieve this, we need to have these laws in place and kickstart the process of enacting the laws in other to facilitate a smooth and effective digital transformation,” he averred.

Inuwa also disclosed that the agency is engaging with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to ensure alignment with global digital governance standards and the engagement is expected to provide valuable expertise and insights into structuring Nigeria’s digital transformation roadmap.

“This initiative is seen as a critical step towards enhancing efficiency, reducing corruption, and promoting transparency in government operations. By leveraging global best practices in alignment with national policies and digital transformation goals, Nigeria will have a smart, seamless and citizen-friendly government service experience, “he concluded.

In his remark, Mr Kholostenko said that Ukraine runs a digital platform known as the Diia application which is an ecosystem that encompasses all of the state registers, databases and can perform all the state and government services for citizens in one place.

He disclosed that it is the intention of his country through its Ministry of Digital Transformation to expand the reach of this initiative and provide full support for other countries to create such kind of system.

“I want to note that we are interested to expand and help other countries to make a digital state, reduce bureaucracy, reduce time for getting state services and of course, to reduce corruption risks, because human-to-human interaction is minimal,” he said.


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UK Orders Apple to Create Backdoor for Encrypted iCloud Data

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United Kingdom has issued a “technical capability notice” to Apple, mandating that the company create a backdoor to access users’ encrypted iCloud data.

UK Orders Apple to Create Backdoor for Encrypted iCloud Data

This directive, issued under the Investigatory Powers Act of 2016, requires Apple to provide British security officials with the means to retrieve all content uploaded to iCloud by any user worldwide.

Apple’s Advanced Data Protection (ADP) feature, introduced in 2022, offers end-to-end encryption for iCloud data, ensuring that only users can access their information.

The UK’s demand challenges this security measure, potentially compelling Apple to either comply by creating the backdoor or withdraw the ADP feature from the UK market.

Compliance could set a precedent, leading other governments to request similar access, thereby raising global privacy concerns.

The UK Home Office has declined to confirm or deny the existence of such notices, stating, “We do not comment on operational matters, including, for example, confirming or denying the existence of any such notices.”

This development underscores the ongoing tension between governmental surveillance efforts and technology companies’ commitments to user privacy.

 


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Oracle Adds AI Pricing Features to Financial Software

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Oracle on Thursday added another set of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to NetSuite, one of its corporate finance software offerings, including some that might make it faster for consumers to get a price quote on purchases like custom bicycles.

Oracle has taken a different tack with AI than rivals such as Microsoft. Rather than racing toward general purpose virtual assistants, Oracle has decided to add targeted features that speed common-but-tedious tasks like entering a brief write-up of how a sales meeting went into a corporate records system.

Another such task that is common in the business world is giving a customer a price quote on a complicated purchase that might have a lot of options, when a sales professional would need to sift through materials to come up with a price.

NetSuite on Thursday announced a feature to compile such a quote via conversation with a chatbot asking what the customer wants, which can either be used by sales professionals behind the scenes to speed up their work, or directly by consumers in the case of e-commerce businesses.

“When you buy something like a bicycle, you have to configure it – figure out what parts you want and which parts work together. We all do it when we buy our cars on the web these days,” Evan Goldberg, executive vice president of Oracle NetSuite, said.

“If you can configure (products) for customers more easily, you can do more deals in a day, or each deal costs less.”

To power those features, Oracle has decided to skip the costly race to develop huge AI models and instead works with partners such as Canadian startup Cohere.

Goldberg said that Oracle’s recent agreement to build massive data centers with ChatGPT creator OpenAI could lead to working with it as well, though the two firms have made no formal announcements.

“I think you could safely say that there’s a possibility that OpenAI will be part of this,” Goldberg told Reuters. “We are eager to work with OpenAI.”

 


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