-In the past ten years, mobile broadband has made an inroad into the country and just in the last six years a twenty-two percent leap has been gained with respect to Internet use penetration. To this end the use of Information and Communication Technology by Nigerians for their various daily activities has gradually but steadily grown. This has remarkably created new jobs, raised the national GDP, and has generally improved ways people live and do business. This advancement however has proven to be a double edged sword as a good number of Nigerians have reportedly fallen victim to different forms of threats online or might have heard about victims of such crimes, which has led to gross distrust in new and existing innovations in the world of ICT. The negative consequence of this on the potential economic alongside technological development that the country could enjoy from the ICT sector is quite obvious. This paper investigates the nature of threats posed at Nigerians as they go online via an online survey. The survey shows 95.2% of respondents are regular internet users with 14.4% as victims of online fraud.
Nigeria; I.
INTRODUCTION
In the early days of telephony, telephone service comprised mainly voice and there were little or no worries about dangers to the user. However, as developments in the field of Information and Communication Technology began to emerge accompanied by the advent of Internet technology, electronic communication began to take a new face. The Internet, which is a network of networks, was designed to support data communications and has played a major role in the advancements recorded in digital technologies. It has resulted to the convergence of computing and telecommunications, and therefore the expansion of conventional telephony and data communications.
There has been an estimated 22% increase with respect to
Internet use penetration in the Nigerian population just
between 2010 and 2016, having the national Internet use
penetration to be 46.1% in 2016, as opposed to 24% in 2010
[
Nigeria currently ranks seventh amongst the top internet
users globally with an Internet penetration of 46.1% of her
population as at July 1st, 2016, consisting of persons who
possess the capabilities to access Internet services from
within the reach of their homes, with the aid of any form of
device and mode of connection [
TYPOLOGY OF ONLINE RISK
Online Risk is any form of Internet related danger that
internet users are prone to. Online risk can still mean the
vulnerability of an organization's internal assets that emerges
from the organization utilizing the Internet to conduct
business [
Internet technology risk can be grouped into two categories namely:
1) Content risk: Content risks comprise three main subcategories: (i) illegal content; (ii) age-inappropriate or harmful content; (iii) harmful advice.
2) Contact risk: Contact risks comprises of (i) cybergrooming (ii) online harassment (iii) cyberbullying
Consumer related risk is a type of risk that occur to
Internet user that engages in buying and selling of goods and
services on the Internet [
1) Online Marketing which is a category of consumer related risk that involves online advertisement for regulated or age-restricted products to minors such as alcohol, cigarettes and prescription medicines. It raises concerns that such marketing downplays risky lifestyles and links children to suppliers online.
2) Fraudulent Transactions occur when an Internet user enters into a distance sales contract but, having paid do not receive adequate value for money or find themselves tied into subscriptions. The fear of fraudulent transactions is very high in Nigeria which is one of the limitation affecting the growth of E-commerce in the country. Fraudulent transactions can be sub-categorized into 2 groups namely: Online fraud and Identity theft
Over the years, smartphones and tablets have gained a
worldwide penetration with over 1.4 billion smartphones
bought in the year 2015. And it was observed that for every
six new phones that were bought five of them ran on an
android operating system [
Over the past few years it has been observed that the
different variants of malware that affect android devices have
been on a very high increase even as they grow very much
stealthy. Hackers all over the world have been working so
hard to develop means by which malware can evade security
software that make use of a signature-based solution. In the
year 2015 there was a 40% increase in the volume of android
malware variants present in cyberspace as against the
volume in 2014 [
The possibility of having Trojan embedded apps on
Google Play store, the official android app store as well as
other intermediary app stores is a leading motivating factor
why hackers are up and about coding up more sophisticated
variants of these malware class [
1) Madware: Basically the most prevalent of all the
classes is the madware also known as aggressive mobile
adware. The term aggressive emanates from the fact that
madware are normally applications that make use of
aggressive methods to put up advertisements on the
notification bar, gallery, messaging application as well as
other applications of an android phone user [
2) Ransomware: The current rate at which people are
faced with the challenge of extortion in Nigeria and
ultimately the entire world is quite alarming, the trending
utilities provided by Information and Communication
Technology (ICT) made use of by almost everyone all over
the world everyday aggravates the success-rate experienced
by perpetrators of this appalling trend. Malicious persons
often use this type of malware to commandeer victims’
electronic resources as well as demand for a “ransom” in
order that the resources be released [
3) Banking-Trojans: Over the years the battle between
financial institutions and attackers have never ceased, the
internet and various smart devices have also had their role to
play in this tug-of-war both towards the positive as well as
the negative axis [
III.
RESEARCH METHOD
The scope identifies the region or domain from which relevant data were gathered for the purpose of carrying out this research. The survey participants were basically obtained from all six geopolitical zones in the federation, having a substantial representation of residents from various parts of the country. The instrument of the survey was a web-based questionnaire administered via social media, e-mail as well as text-messages to various Internet users all over the country. The questionnaire was designed to consist of a six level categorization, category one handled general survey data (i.e. basic demographic data), the next category consisted of questions that cover general internet usage, category three comprised of questions on social media usage, the forth category included questions that compile email usage data, category five contained e-commerce questions and finally the last category probes the user on their level of awareness about online security.
For this study a web-based questionnaire platform served as the primary data collection instrument. The motivation behind selecting this method was as a result of: Its capacity to reach out to a larger geographical area as opposed to manually distributed questionnaires or interviews. The ease in processing data, being that responses can be automatically collected into a database for the purpose of storage, or directly sent to a data analysis application as well as a spreadsheet for further analysis of the data. The possibilities to make available audio and visual directives in order to simplify concepts. Existing provisions for sending out reminders to as many participants who are yet to respond to the questionnaire.
The framework sought to highlight information security measures in the area of business confidentiality as well as modes of governmental security strategy implementation, and also processes put in place to maintain the protection of every Nigerian citizen’s privacy and civil liberty.
With an understanding that telecommunication in Nigeria
has the potential to cause a quantum leap in the level of
development experienced as a nation and is being confronted
with various threats present in cyber space that must be
abated pronto, this framework is to be established on the
basis of the following four areas, which were adopted from
the model of the [
2) Human Resource and Capacity Building: This section involves the institution alongside sustenance of a consortium of well-trained Cyber-Security experts who will be instrumental to the detection, response and recovery from whatever incidence of cyber-attack and would also be at the helm of developmental research in the area of National Cyber-Security.
3) Legal and Regulatory Setup: Here efforts are made to bring up existing policy documents and frameworks to ensure that the public is aware of them as well as possible reviews of such legislative documents in order to provide surety of resort for business stakeholders in cases where they stand as objects of a cybercrime incident.
4) Public Education and Awareness: Stands to be a pivotal part of this framework as it entails fostering educative campaigns targeted at Internet users in both the public and private sectors to retsrain them on matters concerning cyber risks and threats they are exposed to as well as apt actions they could possibly take to stay safe from such incidences.
IV.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
From the data collected under Category One: General survey data, Male gender has 89.1% while female gender has 10.9% of the total respondents as seen in Fig. 3, showing that male gender gave more responses as compared to female gender. Fig. 4 shows that, 56.2% of the respondents are aged between 21-30, 24% are aged between 11-20, 10.4% are aged between 31-40 while between age 41-50 we have 6.3% and respondents above age 50 take 3.1%. 83% of the respondents stays in urban area as compared to those respondents that stay in rural area of 17% as described in Fig. 5. This still shows that those in urban have more access to internet than those in rural area.
Category Two: General Internet Usage Data shows that, 95.2% of the respondents agree they use the internet regularly while 4.8% do not access the internet regularly as represented in Fig. 6. Fig. 7 shows 55.8%, 43.8%, 46.1%, 48%, 25.2%, 4.4% and 4.8% of respondents use Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, UC Browser, Opera, Internet Explorer, Safari and Other browser vendors respectively as means of accessing the internet. On devices used to access the internet seen in Fig. 8, 60.2% of all respondents use laptops, 18.8% use desktop devices, 13.3% use tablets, 66.5% use smartphones and 30% use mobile phones. The responses collated from Category Three: Social Media Usage Data, showed that 97.5% of respondents are on social media while just 2.5% are not. This shows that quite a number of internet users in Nigerian are engaged in social networks making the social platform a wide and easy access to launch unscrupulous activities. Fig. 9 shows 91.2% use Facebook while 81.1% use Whatsapp with 43.5% of the respondents having very frequent access to these platforms and 41.4% accessing it often. Other platforms like Twitter (47.7%), Google+ (45.2%), Skype (20.4%) and 2go (12.8%) had below 50% access by the respondents. A total of 76.3% receive unwanted messages on their social platforms with 12.8% receiving these messages very often, 33.6% often, 31.1% not often and 22.5% rarely as depicted in Fig. 10. This shows that quite a number of this users have privacy breaches not therefore ensuring the confidentiality of their data online. 14.4% have fallen victims of fraud via their social media accounts with 45.5% of this incident resulting to financial and money loss, 23.4% resulting to damaged reputation and a total of 6.5% leading to business discontinuities as seen in Fig. 12 below. the users had other information requested as seen in Fig. 15. 74% of the users took such mails to be a scam which shows quite a high sense and awareness of security, 22.8% considered it a beneficiary but uninteresting one and 12.9% took it to be a legitimate one.
Results gotten from Category Four: Email Usage Data, reveal that 94.4% of respondents use electronic mail. Fig 13. Shows that only 53.3% checking their mails very often and 28.5% having often checks of their mails. 64.2% read all their mails while 35.8% do not. 8.2% do not go through spam messages, 10.9% go through them very often, 17.1% go through them often, 30% rarely go through them and 33.8% do not often go through them. This shows that quite a number of Nigerian internet users pay little or no attention to spam messages coupled with the 26.2% of respondents follow referral links provided in spam messages. 67.5% of respondents receive mails requesting their personal information through links and emails unknown to them with Fig. 14 showing 8.9% receiving such mails very often, 24.5% rarely, 27.3% often and 39.3% not often. Information such as personal bio data were requested from 63.2% of respondents, CV from 27.6% of the users and about 4.4% of
From the data collected under Category Five: ecommerce, 78.2% of the respondents indicated that they perform bank transactions online with 28.5% of them as users who utilize the services always, 54.2% perform transactions online once in a while and 17.3% only when they have no other choice. Of the various possible transactions online 79.5% of the respondents pay bills online, 44.2% purchase items individually while 11.1% make bulk purchases online and 64.7% take advantage of internet for money transfer purposes as shown in Fig. 16. This shows that a good number of Nigerians are knowledgeable about ebusiness portals which means they are also exposed to the various forms of fraudulent attacks by means of imposters posing to be legitimate online store outlets as well as persons who showcase inexistent products online for the sole purpose of duping gullible persons. From Category Six: Security Awareness, 88.1% of respondents attested to using antivirus software which is an obvious indicator of the fact that Nigerians understand the importance of antivirus software for security over and above safety purposes, though for reasons best known to them 11.9% of the respondents do not use antivirus. However, 70.3 % of all respondents make use of free antivirus software mostly because of the cost-implications, 28.4% use paid versions while 22.1 % use cracked antivirus software. With only 28.4% of respondents making use of paid antivirus as depicted in Fig. 17. It is not far from the truth that only this percentage have full authentic protection from threats and various malware over the internet which leaves a tangible sum of the populace exposed. In mobile device use, 72.6% have devices running on android OS, 4% on iOS, 6.7% use Windows mobile devices, 9.9% use Blackberry devices, 0.4% and 4.9% still use devices running on Symbian and Java platforms while a striking 1.3% use other mobile device operating systems. For the category of desktop operating systems, 41.6% of respondents primarily use Windows 7, 3.9% still use Windows XP, 26.9% use Windows 8/8.1, 24.2% use Windows 10 while 1% and 2.4% use Linux and MacOS respectively. This shows that we have more of our respondents prone to various malware attacks as stated in Section II being that more of the respondents are on the android platform, however for the desktop users with no steady firewall protection would still be liable to suffer various threats online. On matters that concerned user awareness, as seen in Fig. 18, 2.5% of respondents classified their knowledge about applications and devices they use to access the internet as poor, 18% as excellent, 35.4% as satisfactory while 44.1% as good. 37.6% of respondents also indicated their knowledge of the settings and configuration of those devices and applications as good, 33.6% as satisfactory, 15.5% as excellent, with 8% and 5.3 as poor and having no knowledge of settings and configurations respectively shown in Fig. 19. Though a substantial amount of the respondents indicated to be aware of their devices and settings it is still important that a more of the Nigerian populace get acquainted with their devices and relevant settings as it is key to averting attacks such as social engineering. For those who look out for security indicators while surfing the internet 60.9% of respondents do while 39.1% do not look out for such indicators. Of the four security indicators specified in the questionnaire, 64.5% of respondents look out for HTTPS, 54.9% for the padlock icon, 23.9% for TRUSTe and 19.8% for Symantec Norton Secure.
V.
CONCLUSION
This paper is posed to discover how vulnerable Nigerians are online. It started by discussing the various types and classes of online risks that users of the Internet are likely to encounter. It also highlighted on the methods of spreading these dangerous wares to unsuspecting users of the Internet. It then went ahead to report thoroughly on the survey carried out to discover how protected or not and how aware are Nigerian Internet users are of online risks. This is done in a bid develop a framework for protecting unsuspecting Nigerian citizens who carry out their daily legitimate businesses online. Doing this will give a boost to the Nigerian telecommunication space and strengthen ecommerce in the country. The paper also gave a brief highlight on the steps towards developing this online protection.