The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) has released six focus areas as part of activities to mark this year’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month.
The Cybersecurity Awareness Month is held every October and is set aside globally to educate and create cybersecurity awareness. This year marks the 20th in the series of collaborative awareness campaigns between public and private sector organisations globally.
The theme for this year’s celebration is: See Yourself in Cyber, which highlights that cybersecurity is everyone’s responsibility. The main purpose of this awareness campaign is to encourage the adoption of safe cyber hygiene. To achieve this effectively, citizens need to accept, understand and be willing to apply these security measures to stay secure.
According to a statement issued and signed by Mrs Hadiza Umar, Head, of Corporate Affairs and External Relations at NITDA, this year’s awareness campaign focuses on sensitising citizens to identifying and countering the following:
- Digital Misinformation and Disinformation;
- Social media attacks (Authentication and Social Engineering attacks);
- Phishing (Phishing scam websites, Email phishing/Business email compromise);
- Cyberbullying;
- Online responsible behavior; and
- Ransomware attacks.
Meanwhile, NITDA is partnering with relevant stakeholders to carry out grassroots awareness campaigns aimed at sensitising the general public of these cyber threats and how to protect themselves. Specifically, the Agency is collaborating with Galaxy Backbone to disseminate specially-designed information flyers to public sector organisations.
The Agency has, in conjunction with O-range Cybersecurity Training Service Limited, conducted Cybersecurity Training in Ilorin, Kwara State, where more than 5,000 youths from various states participated.
Other activities lined up include:
- The NITDA-Cisco Cybersecurity Awareness Training is aimed at training 4,000 youths in Ethical Hacking, Endpoint Security, Network Defense, and Cyber Threat Management. The call for applications was opened on the 2nd of October while the portal for the virtual training will be opened on 18th October 8, 2023;
- A two-day Innovation Challenge on Cybersecurity programme, designed to identify and showcase innovative technologies in cybersecurity with a special focus on identifying solutions that can be adopted in the public sector. So far, over 3,000 applications have been submitted; and
- General Awareness programme focusing on sensitising the general public on NITDA’s initiatives and services such as:
- Trustmark system for online trading;
- Free Web Application Firewall for all MDAs;
- Public Key Infrastructure (PKI);
- Free Vulnerability Analysis and Penetration Testing (VAPT) for MDAs; and
- Monitoring of MDAs portals, social media monitoring and recovery, digital forensics, Cyber drill, and Cybersecurity Training.
