Engr Seyi Basorun an IT and Cybersecurity expert has called on the authority that the current NIN registration exercise is not a solution to kidnapping, Bokoharam and other syndicate crimes. According to him “NIN registration is good but it is not the solution to kidnapping, Bokoharam and other syndicate crimes”. Bashorun was reacting to the recent comments made by NIMC which on Wednesday dismissed as fake, news that its data base had been breached by hackers. Its spokesman, Kayode Adegoke, said: “NIMC would like to assure the public that there have been no such breaches or incidents. Investigations on the alleged data dump were found to be non-existent in the National Identity Database”.
According to Engr Basorun, this issue actually showed that many of our leaders in the country do not have the right capabilities require for their roles. Chief of it all is decision making skillsets. NiMC recently made comments that their website crashed because they are not expecting the traffic that followed the NiN registration deadline announcement. The comment made mockery of Nimc as it is highly expected that average Nigerians will reach out to their website immediately to validate and gather more information concerning the registration process. What they failed to do is to immediately asked their domain host to increase their bandwidth throughput to accommodate the expected traffic. He further said.
Engr Basorun who is the Vice Chairman ICT section of the Nigerian Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, NIEEE, Lagos chapter made known his position during a WhatsApp group chat by saying “I’m also surprised about the trivial response given by NiMC to the allegation of finding their database in the darkweb. Apparently the spoke man or leader making the comments did not understand the context of the conversation. It was reported that the database is found to be on sale in the darkweb ecosystem for certain amount of money, nobody reported that breach has taken place yet. If this is true, its highly dangerous as it means that personal information of about 40 to 50 million Nigerians are in the wrong hands (imagine Russia or NK) and this has to be addressed immediately. It’s not something to wish away just like that, it can ridiculously open us up as a nation. What NiMC needs to assure us with is the information security and privacy controls that they have put in place to protect our private information. Again it shows how much capabilities we have with data handling and protection”.
According to him, “NIN registration is good but it is not the solution to kidnapping, Bokoharam and other syndicate crimes. Im sure we all remember the new vehicle plate number crime stopping story”.
“So most of those bandits have their own radio networks for internal communications. Im not sure NCC has thought about VoIP option. Simply the kidnappers will just switch to VoIP solutions like Skype and webex. They will start making use of international DiDs to perpetrate their acts and cover their paths nicely”.
He advised the government that, “solving a strategic problem requires a strategic approach. You need to start by identifying the root cause of the problem. As a nation the approach we are employing is to treat the symptoms not dealing with the RC. This will only bring a short term solution to the table in my opinion.” Engr Basorun made this contribution on a group WhatsApp of the NIEEE Lagos chapter.
