Abisola Fatokun

Over the past couple of weeks, anyone who has had one ear on the ground for technology-related news would (must) have heard that Google’s servers got attacked by the Chinese government. What people may not know, in addition, is that many other top Silicon Valley corporations were hit by these audacious attacks.

I don’t know if some of these attacks were successful. They were definitely detected, though and Google reckons they were only able to get the subject lines of the emails sent and received by the people being ‘investigated’ by the Chinese government (mostly human rights activists). I give kudos to Google for standing up to the Chinese government and risking the potential loss of the largest single market in the world.

The typical Internet user (myself inclusive) will – at this point – turn to something else just after thinking to myself “all this hacker stuff is beyond me anyways… don’t these guys have time for more productive stuff?” That’s not the right thing to do or think at this moment, though. Why? Because Microsoft has fessed up that their Internet Explorer browser has had a huge security flaw since September last year that has been exploited by these hackers.

Again, you may wonder what exactly that has to do with you. Simply put, the Internet Explorer browser (possibly your browser of choice) was used as the ‘attack vector’ for targeting Google and other Silicon Valley corporations. This got so worrying that the French and German governments officially advised their citizens to download other browsers and stop using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer – at least until the vulnerabilities were fixed.

Which leads me to the Nigerian situation. I use Google Analytics to monitor web traffic to all my websites and the trend over the past month is as follows:

• Internet Explorer : 32%
• Mozilla Firefox : 29%

Quite a number of my website visitors are Nigerians (in the country and outside of it) and from these statistics, it’s clear that Nigerians still prefer Microsoft. The reasons for this would be multiple and I can immediately think of the difficulty of downloading any other browser substitute with the extremely slow and metered Internet access that is available in the country. Also, a lack of education on how much better Firefox is than IE and the paucity of computers in primary and secondary schools as well as in our tertiary institutions ensure that any knowledge of better browsers than IE – or even the recognition that IE is merely the window to the Internet and not the Internet itself, remains esoteric and limited to the knowing few who are probably from rich or upper-middle class families and have the computers and access at home.

It does not behoove our government to educate us about this either as Microsoft have them pocketed. Deep-pocketed. Embarrassingly so. Technology solutions in the upper echelons of our government mean only one thing: Microsoft. Anyone advocating any alternative solution is mocked and summarily ignored. I won’t go into that, though.

Instead, I would like to know what the relevant technology bodies in our country are actually doing to protect us from cyber crime? This especially as a great percentage of global cybercrime originates from Nigeria … why have we not been warned as a country to be careful what we click online? We have not been told that there is a security vulnerability in IE that could leave us open to compromise and could lead to our computers being used as attack vectors on other people?

Does anyone know the name of the organisation in Nigeria that exists for the purpose of policing this kind of stuff?