SON to curb cyber crimes with standardisation

SON to curb cyber crimes with standardisation

* As Nigeria loses N200bn annually

The Director-General, Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON), Mallam Farouk Salim has said that the Agency is committed to standardising the nation’s Information Technology (IT) sector.

This, he said becomes imperative to tackle increasing rate of cyber crimes in the country.

The SON DG made this known during validation exercise for ISO 27001 Information Security Management Systems Course, organised by the Agency in Abuja and Lagos.

The SON DG stressed that the Agency is committed to sanitising the IT industry through training and implementation of International Organisation for Standardisation’s (ISO) Standards.

The Director General, who was represented by the Director, Training Services Engr. Timothy Abner, added that validation of ISO 27001 ISMS course was part of SON’s effort to guarantee confidence in its ability to offer full training and certification packages to Nigerian IT Industry.

According to him :
“The validation course would provide the organisation with holistic and strategic training package to address standardisation, regulatory deficits in the Information Technology sector, in a bid to boost reliability.

“The training would also enable SON to commence offering ISO 27001 Information Security Management Systems Courses for institutions and businesses to secure their information away from hackers and other cyber security threats.

“The training will also increase SON’s pool of qualified auditors in pursuant of the execution of Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between SON and National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), the nation’s foremost supervisory body for Information Technology.”

To achieve these objectives, the SON trainees, who participated in the validation were drawn from Policy, Research and Statistics (PRS) Directorate, and Information Technology Departments of SON.

According to reports, Nigeria loses over N200 billion annually to cyber crimes, the figures described as uunacceptable by the standards body, which restated its commitment to sanitise the IT industry.