Cyber threats: Nigeria ranks 59th - Symantec

Roundtable: Symantec Channel Manager, Nigeria & Ghana, Adeyemi Adeleke

and Symantec Territory Manager, IWECA (Indian Islands, West, East and 

Central Africa),  Sheldon Hand during the Company's Media Roundtable at 

Sheraton Hotel and Towers, Ikeja, Lagos Thursday.

Leading cyber security solution company, Symantec has ranked Nigeria 59^th on its latest ranking from 66 position recorded at the same period last year.

Disclosing this in an exclusive interview with ITRealms Online during his working visit to Nigeria last week, the Territory Manager, Symantec Pty Limited in-charge of Indian Ocean Islands, West, East and Central Africa (IWECA), Mr. Sheldon Hand, said in Lagos that with this ranking, Nigeria’s position has actually increased in the cyber threat sphere.

He explained that the way the ranking work is that if a country is ranked first, it means it’s the most country with security threats.

He also adduced some reasons for the Nigeria’s position, listing the booming economy, advent of more bandwidth routes and explosion in mobile devices.

For him, Internet security threats have actually tripled due to avalanche of technologies, especially mobile devices.

According to him, Symantec recently, released a report which is an analysis of all the threats on the internet, based on its deployment systems to scan over 8 billion electronic mails (emails) per day.

“We have more than 240,000 censors in 200 countries. These censors are networks in strategic places, and what this allows us to do is gather a tremendous amount of information and intelligence about the threats that are happening in the world on the internet,” he said.

Mr. Hand also affirmed that Symantec has specific statistics for Nigeria, which shows that in 2011 Nigeria was ranked the 66^th, which means that is the 66^th highest country with internet threats, but this has increased.

He explained that this does not meant that security threat ranking of Nigeria has gone down.

“No, If you ranks number 1, it means you have the most security internet threat, so Nigeria has gone from 66 to 59 which means security threats have increased,” Mr. Hand said.

As said by him, the reason for the aforementioned ranking based on Symantec perception are in three-fold, namely, the first one “is Nigeria’s economy is booming, it is estimated that about 2015 Nigeria’s economy will be bigger than South Africa’s economy, this is estimated by Morgan Stanley Research.”

He pointed out that over a couple of years, there have been an increase in the broadband capacity in Nigeria.

“So, the internet with broadband is a platform for malicious activities for security threats in one of two ways,” he said.

Lastly, he said, there is an increased security threat in Nigeria because of the adoption of mobile devices which has increased significantly as there is a lot of people using android, iphone, blackberry, tablets and many others.

 Remmy Nweke

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