The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), in line with its mandate, has rolled out activities for the celebration of this year’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month.

Last years, the agency trained 3242 on basic and intermediate cyber security skills in partnership with CISCO. The Cybersecurity Aware­ness Month held every October, is a month set aside globally to educate and create cybersecurity awareness. This year marks the 20th in the series of collaborative awareness campaigns between public and private sector or­ganisations globally.

To mark the 2023 National Cyberse­curity Awareness Month, NITDA has lined up series of programmes specifi­cally focused on sensitising the gener­al public on cybersecurity threats and steps necessary to protect ourselves in the ever-growing digital space.

The theme for this year’s celebra­tion is: See Yourself in Cyber, which highlights that cybersecurity is every­one’s responsibility. The main purpose of this awareness campaign is to en­courage the adoption of safe cyber hygiene. To achieve this effectively, citizens need to accept, understand and be willing to apply these security measures to stay secure.

This year’s awareness campaign focuses on sensitising citizens on identifying and countering the fol­lowing: Digital Misinformation and Disinformation; Social media attacks (Authentication and Social Engineer­ing attacks); Phishing (Phishing scam websites, Email phishing/Business email compromise); Cyber bullying; Online responsible behaviour; and Ransomware attacks.

NITDA is partnering with relevant stakeholders to carry out grassroot awareness campaigns aimed at sen­sitising the general public of these cyberthreats and how to protect themselves. Specifically, the Agency is collaborating with Galaxy Backbone to disseminate spe­cially-designed information flyers to public sector organisations.

The Agency has, in conjunction with O-range Cybersecurity Training Service Limited, conducted Cyberse­curity Training in Ilorin, Kwara State, where more than 5,000 youths from various states participated.

Other activities lined up include: The NITDA-Cisco Cybersecurity Awareness Training aimed at train­ing 4,000 youths in Ethical Hacking, Endpoint Security, Network Defense, and Cyber Threat Management. The call for application was opened on the 2nd October while the portal for the virtual training will be opened on 18th October 8, 2023.