The Director General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Dr. Peter Jack has said that Nigeria has lost about N129 billion to online identity theft.
Jack revealed this, Wednesday, at the National Cybersecurity Policy Capacity Workshop organised by Microsoft Nigeria in conjunction with the Office of the National Security Adviser to the President in Abuja.
According to him, ‘‘There has been a loss of about N129bn in the last 13 years from 2000 to 2013 in terms of online scam and identity theft due to defacement of different websites.
There is a recorded 2,175 websites that have been defaced in terms of web defacement, and among them, 585 are actually government websites, including Lagos state government.
Also available is range of possible attacks on external intrusion through copy rights infringements and unethical IT practices by scammers all the way to insider threats. This is in addition to some statistics of some infringements perpetrated on various online identities.’’