The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) has warned the general public to be conscious of cyber criminals who indulge in Identity theft.
Head Corporate Affairs and External Relations of NITDA, Mrs. Hadiza Umar, gave the warning on Sunday in Abuja in a statement that further buttresses the essence of October as the Cybersecurity Awareness Month.
She explained that Identity theft involves committing fraud by assuming another person’s identity. “The main objective of this kind of fraud is to obtain enough personally identifiable information about a victim so that the attacker can use it to conduct fraud in their name.”
She further explained: “The stolen information can be used for various fraudulent activities such as taking over the victim’s accounts, applying for loans in their name, accessing medical services, defrauding family and friends and a whole lot more.”
Mrs. Umar advised the members of the public to limit the amount of personal information shared on their social networks like Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, among others.
She further advised that people should use only strong and unique passwords across their online accounts and enable multi-factor authentication where possible.
Laying out other security measures to be taken by individuals, the NITDA Spokesperson said: “Ensure you visit only websites that are secured, avoid using public Wi-Fi to carry out sensitive transactions and other processes that require logging into an account.
“Never provide corporate or personal data such as date of birth, mother’s maiden name, National Identification Number to unsolicited callers, via email or text message”.
Mrs. Umar encouraged the public to reach out to the Computer Emergency Readiness Response Team (CERRT) of the agency for enquiries.
