The recent report revealing that over 90 percent of Nigerian business entities on the web are operating below the security poverty line means that they lacked strong cyber security protection.
This was explained by the chief operating officer of Serianu-One, Joseph Mathenge, one of the authors of the report.
He made it clear that “Security poverty line is the inability to meet basic needs necessary to detect cyber threats and ward off threats during attacks”.
According to him, “When an organization does not have process and resources in-house to secure their organization against external or within attacks, unfortunately, in Nigeria we witnessed the overwhelming sense of hopelessness in being unable to meet anyone life basic needs.
“In our report we build on the concept of the security poverty line in which an organization is seen to be unable to effectively protect itself from cyber threat.
Continuing, Mathenge averred that “In 2018 all organization needs to measure whether they have adequately invested to protect, detect, respond and recover to cyber events”.
In his analysis, Ike Nnamani, president of Demadiur Systems who is also a co-contributor to the report, observed that “Components of security poverty line including policies on Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), monitoring of devices brought to the network by staff and policy on insider staff that are disgruntled fuel fraud intent and act”.
While emphasizing the need for reporting confirmed cyber fraud acts to security agencies, Nnamani argued that “When it is not reported it will be difficult to put the right policies in-place to prevent future occurrences. When it is unsolved, it shows that the right regulatory and legal policies are not yet in-place to ensure that law enforcement agents can prosecute offenders and get them punished”.
