A Federal Government Panel on National Cyber Security has raised the alarm over persistent cyber security threats and internet hackings across the country, saying that the country has been losing 90 billion naira every year to cyber crimes since twenty-fourteen.

At its inauguaral meeting in Abuja, the panel which comprises of representatives from the Office of the National Security Adviser, ONSA, National Information Technology Development Agency, NITDA, the Federal Ministry of Communications, Nigeria Postal Service, NIPOST, NigComSat, Nigeria Computer Society, and CS2 called for concerted efforts to arrest the situation.

The panel also known as the inter-ministerial Technical Committee on the implementation of the National Cyber security Strategy insisted that pro-active measures should be taken to address the problem.

Head of Corporate Affairs of NITDA, Hadiza Umar said the Director General of the National Information Technology Development Agency, Isa Pantami urged the panel to urgently address the misuse and abuse of access to the tools of Information Technology,

Pantami said thee Information Technological tools that have become vital in their critical activities were also avenues adopted by individuals and groups to carry out a range of malicious activities, saying the threats could be targeted at national critical infrastructures, government/private institutions or individuals.

Nigeria was the 17th most attached nation in the world based on threat intelligence drawn from Check Point Software Technologies. Office of the National Security adviser (ONSA) recently disclosed that of the 2,175 Nigerian websites hacked in 2015, 585 were government owned”, he added.

The scale and dimension of the threats according to Pantami has compelled the Agency to develop and implement a new cyber security strategy for the Federal Civil and Public Service Sector with the approval of the Minister of Communications.

He called for continuous collaborative efforts as information security was not a one-off programme, as according to him the threat landscape keeps changing.