internet fraud
As part of efforts to ensure security of e- mails as well as reducing all the fraudulent traffic credited to Nigeria, the Federal Government has ordered all the Ministries, Departments and Agencies to migrate to the government domain of .gov.ng for all government internet activities and official businesses.
Omobola Johnson, Minister of Communication Technology who gave the directive in Abuja during a workshop on the effective management of the domain name .gov.ng by Nigerian Internet Registration Association (NIRA) said official email addresses ending in .gov.ng are much more secure than those addresses obtained from the freely available internet services.
Johnson who was represented by Monilola Awojo said most of the fraudulent mail traffic credited to Nigeria are actually not from the country but because there was no official domain and most of the MDAs use free domain, the email addresses could be easily hijacked and used fraudulently.
She posited that if the traffic emanating from Nigeria were contained in the secured government domain of .gov.ng, the activities of the internet criminals could be reduced to the barest minimum, as it is safer , adding that as most of the offices are in unsecured domain it is thus difficult to defend any allegation against Nigeria on fraudulent internet activities.
The minister stated that a mass migration to the .ng.gov domain by MDAs and other Nigerians would ensure the implementation of the first step in our e-government strategy aimed at connecting government within itself and with the citizens of Nigeria on a safe common platform that will increase local traffic and thus reduce overall cost of governance.
While noting that NIRA signed an MOU with the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) to manage the resources, she said NIRA runs the technological infrastructure which locates a computer on the internet that hosts a website or e-mail when you request, send or receive information to/from addresses that end with .ng.
Johnson stressed further that NIRA has since embarked on both sensitisation of stakeholders and soliciting their support on the management of this resource, adding that the utilisation of the .gov.ng domain name by all MDAs is a critical step in the implementation of our e-government strategy.
“The domain name ending with “ng” is a National Resource. It is a unique identifier for every Nigerian on the world wide web while “.gov.ng” is exclusively preserved to be used by all government MDAs. She added that official e mail addresses ending in.gov.ng are much more secure than those addresses obtained from the freely available internet mail services”
She hinted that “at present, close to 40,000 .gov.ng email accounts have been created for all principal officers, permanent secretaries, heads of paratstatals, directors and other management staff of various MDAs and new easy to remember domain names being created. This will allow affairs of the site to be run more securely within the national domain space.
Cleopas Aganye, Director General NITDA said the directive will enhance the patronage of made in Nigeria ICT products and services, adding that it is a major steps towards promoting and marketing a major critical indigenous ICT resource available through the .ng platform being managed by NiRA
He stressed that the level of ICT penetration in the country also calls for developing efforts to serve indigenous market, attract foreign direct investment and contribute to our GDP, noting that the Nigeria internet population has witnessed tremendous growth with a boost from 2.5 million users in 2005 to over 44 million in 2008 thereby positioning Nigeria as one of the fastest growing internet users in sub-Saharan Africa.
