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SON Set To Check Hackers, Cyber Crimes In Nigeria

Worried by the huge financial losses to cyber crimes and hackers in Nigeria, the Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON) has expressed its commitment to standardise the nation’s Information Technology (IT) sector.
Giving the assurance during a recent validation exercise for the ISO 27001 Information Security Management Systems Course, organised by the SON in Abuja and Lagos, the Director-General and Chief Executive of SON, Mallam Farouk Salim, said SON is committed to sanitising the IT industry through training and implementation of the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) standards.
Salim said the validation course would amongst others provide the organisation with a holistic and strategic training package, when deployed and would address standardisation and regulatory deficits in the Information Technology sector, in a bid to boost reliability and efficiency in the sector of the nation’s economy, especially through the regulatory agencies and professional bodies.
He indicated further that the training would also ensure that SON could commence offering ISO 27001 Information Security Management Systems Courses for institutions and businesses that wished to secure their information away from hackers and other cybersecurity threats.
“The training will also increase SON’s pool of qualified auditors in pursuant of the execution of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between SON and the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), the nation’s foremost supervisory body for Information Technology.
“At the end of the capacity building training, it is expected that the training package developed will be implemented successfully in the training. SON has scheduled for staff of the Nigerian Communications Satellite Limited (NIGCOMSAT) to be facilitated by the SON Training Services (STS) Directorate in the coming week,” Salim said.
Towards achieving these objectives, the SON trainees, who participated in the validation, were drawn from the Policy, Research and Statistics (PRS) Directorate, and the Information Technology Departments of SON.
The SON Training Services Directorate, within this period of the validation exercise for ISO 27001, announced the release of the year 2022 training programmes and the commencement of the circulation of enrolment forms to the general public for various courses scheduled for the year.
According to reports, Nigeria loses over N200 billion annually to cyber crimes, a figure described as ‘unacceptable’ by the SON while restating its commitment to sanitise the IT industry.
By: Nkpemenyie Mcdominic, Lagos