@ISPON Webinar: Indigenous software, strategic imperative for Nigeria’s security - ITREALMS

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The Institute of Software Practitioners of Nigeria (ISPON) delivered a trenchant call to action at its December 2025 webinar, unequivocally declaring that Indigenous Software is not merely an economic preference but a strategic imperative for safeguarding Nigeria's national development and security, reports ITREALMS.

The event, convened by the National Governing Council under the Chairmanship of Chris Uwaje, gathered over 30 software researchers, data-scientists, and policy-makers spanning four continents.

Is Nigeria’s software industry powerless in AI Age asks Don Pedro Aganbi - ITREALMS

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rewriting the rules of global software development, creating new winners and leaving laggards behind. Across the world, countries are racing to integrate AI into their economies, from digital governance and financial services to health and education. 

Yet in Nigeria, the conversation remains fragmented, weighed down by institutional inertia, leadership wrangling, and a lack of coherent national direction.

Bimbo Abioye emerges ISPON president - ITREALMS

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The Institute of Software Practitioners of Nigeria (ISPON) has elected Bimbo Abioye as the latest president alongside eight others, for the next two years as members of the Executive Council, reports ITREALMS.

Abioye emerged president at the just concluded Annual General Meeting (AGM) of ISPON held in Lagos, Friday.

NCC-CSIRT: Beware of pirated YouTube software-related Malware - ITREALMS

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The Computer Security Incident Response Team (NCC-CSIRT) of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has warned those looking to acquire pirated software and resources that they risk becoming victims of cybercriminal gangs that are using AI-generated YouTube videos to distribute malware, reports ITREALMS.

Also, NCC-CSIRT warned in its advisory that the consequences of falling victim can be significant for individuals and organizations, resulting in critical damage like data theft, financial loss, identity theft, system damage, and reputation damage.

Pantami leads software players to TestNigeria conference - ITREALMS

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The Federal Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Professor Isa Ali Ibrahim (Pantami) is set to lead stakeholders in the country’s software industry to the first Software Testing Conference tagged ‘TestNigeria Conference 1.0’, organized by Nigeria Software Testing Qualification Board (NGSTQB).

Since assumption of office in August of 2019, Professor Pantami’s aggressive initiatives and reforms towards digital transformation have received recognitions within and outside the country.

FG to democratize software testing, targets 50,000 testers - ITREALMS

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The Federal Government (FG) has expressed determination to democratise software testing in the country with a target of 50,000 testers in the next three years, reports ITREALMS.

FG also disclosed readiness to collaborate with the Nigeria Software Testing Qualification Board (NGSTQB) in democratizing software testing; where licensed professionals would provide software testing services as the Board said it is working towards collaborating with major stakeholders in different sectors to train and certify 50,000 software testers in the next in the next years.

FinTrak Credit 360 brings efficiency to risk management process - ITREALMS

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Fintrak Software Limited, Nigeria’s foremost indigenous financial technology (Fintech) solution provider with physical presence in some African countries recently brought the banking and financial industry stakeholders together to update them on their robust Credit Risk Management solution known as FinTrak Credit Risk 360. The industry experts applauded the software as a robust indigenous solution for banks in Africa.

Speaking during the presentation, the Group Managing Director, Bimbo Abioye stated that “FinTrak software delivers customized state of the art business transformation solutions that can intelligently combine efficiency with critical information needed for management decision-making process. FinTrak Credit 360 software has been able to improve user banks overall operational efficiency by over forty percent through automated strategic and digitized policy controls."

NSOFT hosts NOTAP DG, as Dan-Azumi pledges more support - ITREALMS

ITREALMS:

The National Software Think Tank (NSOFT) has hosted the Director-General (DG) of the National Office for Technology Acquisition and Promotion (NOTAP), Dr. Ibrahim Mohammed Dan-Azumi, reports NSOFT hosts NOTAP DG, as Dan-Azumi pledges more support - ITREALMS.

NSOFT also appreciated the DG with an award as a friend of the software industry and development in the country, due to  his foresightedness in setting up the think tank.

This is coming as Dr. Dan-Azumi has pledged more support to ensure progression of software industry in Nigeria.

Speaking at the reception, the Chairman, National Software Think Tank, Chief Chris Uwaje said that this has become necessary, at this time Dr. Dan-Azumi is on his second tenure to encourage him to consolidate on a number of software-related matters and to continue to upscale its promotion too.

NSOFT, he said, was the outcome of the two-day ICT Stakeholders Roundtable on the application and use of software in the financial sector, jointly hosted in Lagos by NOTAP and the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) between March 18 through 19, 2019 and was inaugurated

NSOFT, he noted was inaugurated by NOTAP earlier in the year to address some of the critical challenges in the national software ecosystem with the mandate to explore the need for and provide a Five Year - National Software Strategic Plan for consideration.

“It is my pleasure therefore to inform you that NSOFT has completed and submitted the report of the assignment,” he said, congratulated the DG on his reappointment by the Federal Government for the second term as DG. NOTAP.

It is in this regards, Uwaje said, “his passion for the promotion of Local Content with particular reference to software and performances, he was singled out for appreciation.”

In his response, Dr. Dan-Azumi thanked NSOFT for the honour, assuring them that with adequate understanding and support of the industry, more achievement will be recorded before the end of his tenure.

For him, implementation of policy directions is key to successful emancipation of the country from poverty-ranking and technology stands the chance for leapfrogging the nation.

NOTAP, he said, will not take any option than promotion of technologies and intellectual properties of Nigerians

The cocktail, held on courtesy of FINTRACK Software Solutions & UnionSystems attracted topnotch leaders of the industry including President, Digital Bridge Institute, Prof. Mohammed Ajiya, Director of New Media and Information Security at the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Engr. Haru Al-Hassan, chairman of the Association of Licensed Telecom Operators of Nigeria, Engr. Gbenga Adebayo, President of Institute of Software Practitioners of Nigeria (ISPON), Dr. Yale Okeremi, Executive Director, SystemSpecs, Deremi Atanda, Director at NOTAP, Mr. Jonas Nzeagu and the ICT media, among others.

Chuks Egbuna/Editor

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Pix: Gbenga Adebayo, chairman of ALTON, congratulating NOTAP DG Dr Dan-Azumi on his award by NSOFT led by Chief Chris Uwaje

Nigerian Simi is Opera software brand ambassador

ITREALMS:

The acclaimed everyday browser, Opera, has started the year 2018 by naming a Nigerian singer, songwriter and vocalist, Simi, as its brand ambassador, reports ITRealms.

Opera, ITRealms through this partnership, will deliver the hottest news from her and other trending artists right to homepages of users of its browser. While Simi will be spreading the word about Opera’s recently released news and video app, Opera News, which has been launched as a stand-alone product after the success of the news service in Opera Mini.

“Just like so many listeners over the world, at Opera we are all fans of Simi’s music. Working with an award-winning artist is a very exciting development,” says Opera’s Global Head of Marketing and Distribution, Jørgen Arnesen. “Together, we will allow millions of users and music listeners to keep up-to-speed with her journey through Opera Mini and Opera News.”

Simi will kick off the partnership with the campaign #OperaConfam. Opera users will have a chance to win exclusive prizes as well as the possibility to meet Simi. Follow Opera on Facebook and Instagram to find out more.

“I’m delighted to be working with such an exciting brand as Opera, helping them introduce Opera News to Nigeria and reminding everyone how awesome Opera Mini is”, said Simi. “I had a great year in 2017 personally and to start this new one with this collaboration is so exciting. I’m doing lots of projects with Opera over the coming months, so watch this space.”

Opera News offers the latest local, national and international hard topics, infotainment and trending video content to 21 countries in the African continent, including dedicated football channels, business news and much more.

Simi, currently signed to X3M Music, joins Chelsea FC midfielder Victor Moses in promoting the company - the Nigerian footballer working on a number of projects throughout the year as a brand ambassador for Africa.

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Datatex releases telephone software, AMETHYST v2

ITRealms:

 

Innovative telephony software solutions provider, the Datatex has officially released the fully re-engineered version of AMETHYST, its exceedingly popular, industry leading, web-based telephone call recording system and quality management software, reports ITRealms.

Datatex Chief executive officer, Mr Johan Landman, disclosed to ITRealms that the original AMETHYST developed some 15 years ago, remains without question, a really solid software solution, “but the reality is that there are only so many upgrades you can do – especially in a 15 year time frame.”

As said by him, “Technology and needs have changed quite dramatically and we recognised that the time had come to essentially start afresh and create a completely new version of our software. The new version, AMETHYST2, builds on the already powerful capabilities of the original AMETHYST, while making sure that we fully capitalise on the capabilities that more modern technology offers.”

Landman explained the reasons behind re-designing from scratch, saying it offers more features, and improved functionality.

ITRealms gathered that in 2015, Datatex embarked on re-creating AMETHYST from the ground up.

“After two years of careful planning, programming and rigorous testing by their own team of programmers - the result is a more modern, flexible Call Recording and Quality Management platform,” he said.

Citing for example, that the company is now offering unlimited supervisor licences which are free, while “we’ve built in functions that allow for extensive group structures and access control. The way that the original AMETHYST had been developed was somewhat more restrictive. We’re now able to accommodate much more of what we know our clients need.”

“So with AMETHYST2, companies and users alike can look forward to a wide range of incredible new features that improve workflow and overall management.

“Company decision makers in particular, will be pleased with key operational improvements which include the fact that AMETHYST2 is now a 64bit application. This allows for greater processing speeds. The software also provides for more efficient and cost effective scalability, and an even greater standard of reliability and redundancy.”

Chuks Egbune/GEE

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ISPON mourns Madiba: He represents African software

ITRealms:

The Institute of Software Practitioners of Nigeria (ISPON) has joined the world in mourning the death of former South African president, Nelson Mandela, who died last Thursday in his country, reports ITRealms.

president, Chief Chris Uwaje in his remarks told ITRealms that Mandela represents and demonstrates perhaps, the most complex and greatest software out of Africa that the human mind had ever vision.

He also said that Mandela represents African software ever conceptualized, structurally defined, strategically codified and wholeheartedly delivered for the application and benefit of human progress.

“Madiba is ‘Knowledge Magic’ pure and simple. This is why ISPON mourns his unforgettable demise,” he explained.

Uwaje further emphasised that if man were God, Madiba Nelson Mandela would not have died!

“With his death, the world and indeed the entire humanity have lost an enigmatic knowledge fountain and a colossus in the wilderness of constructive logic,” he said.

During his short span of service to humanity eclipsed by the twenty- seven and a half (27.5) years of unjustified detention at Robin Island jail, he positively touched the lives of many billion people of all races.

ISPON thus, recognizes Madiba as a great reservoir of concentrated knowledge, an embodiment of constructive logic and an unrivaled master-software algorithm. His dynamic leadership attitude radiates a calculus-minded human model, one that only a Software Knowledge Super architect can codify.

Mandela has progressively but efficiently reduced our ignorance of human co-existence and relations and by extension, lightened-up the global pathway in search of Democracy architecture.

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Automative overtakes Education in February spam rating - Report

February Intelligence Report of the Symantec Corporation has revealed that automotive sector has surpassed education sector in excess of three per cent spam rate.

The latest of this report made available to ITRealms Online, showed that as at the time of reporting, which is last month, February ending, that automotive sector recorded spam rate of 70.9 per cent, while education has 70.6 per cent spam rate.

Symantec also discovered that spam rate for the Chemical and Pharmaceutical sector was 68.9 per cent, and when compared with 68.4 per cent for Information Technology (IT) Services, 68.6 per cent for Retail, 68.5 per cent for Public Sector and 68.0 percent for Finance.

This, according to the report has shown that businesses are being targeted with emails purporting to originate from the US Better Business Bureau, socially engineered to suggest that a complaint had been filed against the organization and the details of the complaint could be found in the file attachment, which would lead to a Portable Document Format (PDF) file that contains an embedded executable or a universal resource locator (URL) that leads to the malware.

Reacting to this development, the Security Intelligent Manager at Symantec, Mr. Paul Wood noted that, these attacks are reminiscent of similar incidents that were first reported in 2007, when C-level business executives were being targeted with emails that purported to originate from the US Better Business Bureau (BBB).

The new wave of attacks bear similar social engineering techniques to the 2007 attacks, although recently the attackers are using considerably more advanced techniques, including server-side polymorphism, making them especially protean in nature.

“Server-side polymorphism enables the attacker to generate a unique strain of malware for each use, in order to evade detection by traditional anti-virus security software. Scripts such as Personal Home Page (PHP) are commonly used on the attacker’s Web site to generate the malicious code on-the-fly,” he identified.

Mr. Wood also stated that like the Greek sea-god, Proteus, the continually transforming nature of these attacks makes them very difficult to recognize and detect using more traditional signature-based defenses.

Remmy Nweke

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SAP reiterates commitment to Nigerian market

L-R Mr Richard Edet, Mr Tim Noble, and Mr Pfungwa Serima

As part of efforts to boost its investment and growth strategy in Nigeria, SAP has reiterated its commitment to the Nigerian market.

SAP is reputed for development of enterprise business application software that makes companies more efficient, more productive and more profitable.

Vice-President of SAP for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), Mr. Tim Noble gave this assurance in a chat with journalists in Lagos, during a working visit.

SAP, he said, is happy on the global front, adding that the company has grown very rapidly in the last four decades.

Noble also said that there are five key areas the company recorded exciting growth in terms of geography, namely Brazil, Russia, China, Middle East and Africa.

He hinted that the first is the whole layer of Applications and SAP’s goal is to make the world run better.

The second, he said, is SAP’s analytics; where they company gives a clear understanding of customers by providing solutions to businesses.
 

For, the third area is in the mobility and fourth is database and technology, whereas the fifth area is in the area of cloud.
 

Nigeria, he said, is one of the most important markets for SAP, stressing that they needed to grow this market by about a 100 people a year in SAP.

“We have to build more partners. Through SAP and appropriate partners, we will have significant growth throughout Africa,” he said.

Equally speaking, the managing director, SAP West Africa, Mr. Richard Edet, said SAP has seen significant growth in terms of revenue.

He pointed out that SAP is not only for big organizations, but rather provides solutions that could fit any customer in excess of 88,000 small medium enterprises world-wide.

“We have a customer of ours who operates from Alaba market. We also have a car dealer who is our customer,” Edet declared.
 

On SAP’s young professional scheme to Nigerians, he said, the company has an initiative to take graduates from university and train them. 

“We have several educational partners who deliver classroom lectures. We are also in talks with big organizations to train people,” he said.

In his submission, the Head of the Africa market unit, Mr. Pfungwa Serima, said the growth of SAP in the African continent that they were fortunate to have worked with good and quality partners.

“And we also partner with a lot of customers and our commitment to Nigeria is very important,” he said, stressing that SAP also invests in communities where they are doing business because it is not only about the company coming in to do business with indigenous organisation.

Remmy Nweke

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Microsoft insists on case against Kelihos

 

Microsoft has reiterated its determination to campaign against the Kelihos botnet, which has seen the company file a lawsuit against the Russian man it now believes to be responsible for its operations, reports TechWorld.

In a filing to a Virginia court, Microsoft alleged that Andrey N. Sabelnikov from St. Petersburg contributed code for the malware that set up the bot, registering 3,700 Czech .cz subdomains to aid its operation.

The company’s campaign against Kelihos dates back to last September when it launched a similar court action against a Czech-based domain provider, the dotFREE Group and its owner Dominique Piatti, who were accused of hosting the domains that made Kelihos possible.

Both were later exonerated after they agreed to aid Microsoft’s Kelihos investigation, but the accused Kelihos botmaster’s former employer, were reportedly ‘angered’ at revelation, hence the Kelihos botnet domain provider promises to make amends.

The report has it that Microsoft has passed the Rustock botnet case on to the Federal Bureau Investigation (FBI) for further actions.

According to the report, researchers discovered 4.5 million-strong super-botnet under the company also named “John Does 1-22” as being involved in Kelihos, one of whom must have included Sabelnikov himself.

Kelihos was always a pretty modest botnet, the report added, but the number of infected hosts is not thought to have gone above 45,000, but Microsoft sees disrupting every botnet using legal means as strategically important.

“Microsoft is committed to following the evidence wherever it leads us through the investigation in order to hold Kelihos’ operators accountable for their actions,” the company said in a new blog post on the case.

Further, Microsoft said it believes this is important both because of the harm caused by Kelihos and because all botnet operators should understand that there are risks and consequences for engaging in malicious activity.

The case bears a superficial resemblance to last week’s naming of the Russians alleged by Facebook and other security companies to have been involved in the Koobface worm that assaulted users of various social networks between 2008 and 2010.

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CommTech unveils draft ICT policy for comments

Mrs. Johnson, CommTech Minister

Living up to expectation, the Nigeria’s Ministry of Communications Technology, Monday unveiled the draft National Information and Communications Technology (ICT) policy document on its website for comments by stakeholders in the country.

The draft policy was uploaded Monday morning in fulfillment of pledge by CommTech Minister, Mrs. Omobola Johnson on the Ministry’s website at http://commtech.gov.ng and the Ministry’s Blog at http://blog.commtech.gov.ng.

Confirming this, the Special Adviser on Media and Publicity to the Minister, Mrs. Efem Nkanga said that the 55-page policy document is the harmonization of the disparate policies governing the ICT industry.

“It will be the overarching guide and platform for the overall development of the ICT industry and will facilitate the creation of a digital, knowledge based economy,” she said in a press statement made available to ITRealms Online.

She recalled that the Minister of Communications Technology, Mrs. Omobola Johnson, had on August 25, 2011, set up an Adhoc Committee to harmonize all the various policies for the different sectors in the ICT industry, namely the telecommunications, broadcasting, Information Technology and postal services.

The harmonization of the various policies, she said, marks the first step in the restructuring of the industry for the overall development of the ICT sector in the country.

Nkanga also said that the policy would be on the Ministry’s website for two weeks and stakeholders and members of the public are expected to view the policy and make their comments before it is presented to the Federal Executive Council (FEC).

She pointed out that stakeholders in the industry had for long canvassed for the harmonisation of different ICT policies in the industry to fast track the development of Nigeria into a digital economy for sustainable development.

“The harmonized policy is expected to lay the foundation for the overall development of the nation’s ICT sector,” she said.

Remmy Nweke
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