09042021- Insecurity: Tension mounts in Imo, Abia, Rivers

The return of Luna and Gbagbo
THE former Latin American
labour leader and past
Brazilian President, Luiz Inacio
Lula da Silva, and African
intellectual and ex-President of
Cote d’Ivoire, Laurent Gbagbo,
have returned from years in prison
to be the hope of their various
countries. Both are victims of
international conspiracy executed
by local lackeys employing
dubious judicial processes
designed to work to a given
answer.
Luna and Gbagbo are
courageous men who challenged
decades of subservience
to international powers and
profiteers; their leadership gave
hope to their people. Both
men have just survived vicious
schemes to quash them.
Luna had led the
Brazilian Workers Party to
victory in 2003. The trade
unionist who had been
imprisoned for opposing military
rule, secured 39 million votes or
46.4 per-cent of the votes to
become president said after his
victory: “I, who so many times
was accused of not having a
university diploma, won my first
diploma as president of the
Republic of Brazil.”
He had tried to reverse the
exploitative relations between the
state and the Brazilian people.
He introduced massive social
works, lifted 19 million
Cybersecurity in 2021 – What to expect
By JASON IKEGWU
YEAR 2020 was a significant one for all
people worldwide with the outbreak of
the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a year in
which all aspects of our lives were drastically
affected, exposing our collective fragility and
increasing feelings of fear and uncertainty. The
arrival of COVID-19 forced people’s lives to
move online, both at work and in person, and
digital transformation accelerated.
Technology helped to maintain social and
emotional well-being and helped many
organisations stay afloat. However, this new
reality has also led to an increase in the
number of cyber-attacks.
As cyber-attacks increase and new
cybersecurity trends continue to emerge,
organisations must take a proactive IT security
stance to keep their operations safe. They must
become more agile, flexible, and collaborative
as they strive to protect their critical assets and
infrastructure. They need to increase their
digital security initiatives, change strategies,
and educate employees about cybersecurity
to deal with this increase in cyber-threats. The
year came with an optimistic outlook
considering the current strides in developing
vaccines for COVID-19. As businesses seek to
transition to a new normal in 2021, we will
examine some of the projections and
expectations in the cybersecurity landscape
and what will underpin organisations’
cybersecurity priorities in 2021.
•There will be increased demand for remote
working security. As organisations embrace
remote and smart working, remote access to
corporate environments brings quite
significant constraints for enterprises to protect
and ensure secure access to their networks.
There is an urgent need for organisations to
reimagine their cybersecurity approaches and
evolve countermeasures of protecting
Brazilians from extreme poverty
and vastly expanded access to
education. His government
gave poor families a monthly
subsidy of between $12 and $117
per child which covered 12
million homes, and moved 30
million people from the lower
classes into the middle class.
Luna was re-elected in
the October 2006 elections, this
time securing 46 million votes
or 48.6 per-cent of total vote cast.
He was succeeded in 2010
by fellow party member, Dilma
Rousseff who continued in his
steps. Since their opponents could
not muster the needed votes to
defeat them at the polls, they
hatched a ‘constitutional coup’ in
2016.
Rousseff was accused in
parliament that back in 2014,
she did not disclose the true size
of the country’s budget deficit
and that this was tantamount to
an abuse of office and, therefore,
impeachable. On that basis, she
was removed from office.
Simultaneously, Luna was set up
for political incineration by
having what turned out to be false
cases of corruption brought
against him. As a result, in 2017,
he was sentenced to a dozen years
imprisonment on allegation
of receiving a seaside
apartment as part of a contract
award kickback. On the basis of
this, he was banned in 2018 from
teleworkers in the emerging future of work. In
2021, there will be increased adoption of
remote and smart working models, and
organisations must proactively embrace the
zero-trust architecture to combat remote
working threats.
•Multi-Factor Authentication, MFA, will be
critical. Nowadays, there are daily
occurrences of authentication attacks and
cybercriminals have perfected measures of
using stolen usernames and passwords on
underground forums to compromise
organisations, using password spraying and
credential stuffing attacks. Over time,
cybercriminals have perfected the act of
syphoning billions of credentials from
breached interactions and systems across the
dark web and underground forums.
•These databases, paired with the ease of
automating authentication attacks, means no
internet-exposed service is safe from cyber
intrusion if it is not using MFA. MFAs will be
mandated as authentication requirements by
regulators in many countries in 2021 and will
be used to enforce and maintain security levels.
Organisations should, therefore, make
adequate preparations for implementing
different variants of MFAs to cope with
emerging trends and challenges.
•The challenges around cloud security will
increase. Even though organisations were
gradually migrating to cloud before 2020, the
advent of the COVID-19 pandemic
accelerated cloud adoption and empowered
remote working and online collaboration. This
rapid migration and cloud adoption opened
up new security threats and vulnerabilities
across different computing systems, though
the traditional cloud technology was premised
around functionality and convenience and not
security. Cybercriminals exploit these gaps to
perpetrate all kinds of havoc, including
espionage and cross country cyber attacks. To
contesting the presidential
election. The Supreme Court in
November 2019 allowed him to
remain free while his appeals
were pending.
This process led to the rise of
incumbent President Jair
Bolsonaro who tried to reverse
the Luna programmes and erase
his legacy. Bolsario is not only
running an anti-people
government but has led the
country into ruins with his
handling of the COVID-19
pandemic. In aping then
President Donald Trump of the
United States, he had declared the
coronavirus a ruse, a “fantasy”.
He went far beyond the Trump
tantrums by actually holding
mass rallies of people without
masks during which he shook
hands to demonstrate to
Brazilians that that COVID-19 is
a fiction. Even when these rallies
Gbagbo’s welcome
return will give hope to
Ivorians as Ouattara,
despite an
unconstitutional third
term in office has
proven to be a disaster
spread the virus, he dismissed it
and assured Brazilians they are
immune to COVID-19 because as
he falsely claimed, they have
antibodies. He also
encouraged them to reject
lockdowns by local state officials
and went on as President, to
declare the lockdowns illegal. The
states had to approach the
Supreme Court to reverse him.
The result was that Brazilians
began to die like flies. On March
23, 2021, Brazil’s daily COVID-
19 death toll soared past 3,000
with many hospitals
at breaking point. That day, the
number of deaths were 3,251
deaths bringing the overall death
toll to nearly 299,000.
protect their information assets, organisations
will have to focus efforts on improving cloud
security initiatives. Prevention and detection
strategies will be crucial for all organisations,
large or small, to protect themselves against
these threats. Expanding the use of the cloud
will require organisations to improve the
visibility of their cloud presence, assets and
vendor relationships to manage risks.
•The adoption of technology-driven security
tools will be rapid. Today’s most effective
cybersecurity measures centre around insight
and response. The mechanism for providing
spontaneous response and data-driven insights
rests on technology. These technologies,
including automated security tools and
advanced machine learning technologies,
support decision making and provide alerts
on risky thresholds in tackling threats and
vulnerabilities. In 2021 the use of these
technology-driven security tools will be at the
centre of cybersecurity implementation.
With growing data privacy awareness and
the adoption of the GDPR globally come
greater scrutiny from clients and consumers,
who demand their sensitive information be
kept safe. Legacy technologies built on static
rules can simply not stand up to this pressure,
and we are instead going to see even greater
adoption of intelligent security technologies
that use contextual machine learning to keep
data safe. Organisations will need to make
conscious efforts to create security strategies
and implement the same with intelligent
technology-driven security tools and advanced
machine learning technologies.
•There will be an increase in ransomware
Vanguard, FRIDAY, APRIL 9, 2021—17
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On that same day, Bolsonaro
appointed his fourth Health
Minister, a Cardiologist
Marcelo Queiroga, 55. He
replaced Eduardo Pazuello, an
army general with no medical
experience who had been
appointed based on the
President’s questionable
conclusion that COVID-19 may
require the handling of a strong
hand. The first two Health
Ministers, Doctors Luiz Henrique
Mandetta and Nelson Teich had
to go when Bolsonario rejected
medical advice in handling the
pandemic.
Now, many Brazilians are
turning back to Luna to save the
country both from the pandemic
and its political version:
Bolsonaro. The coast for Luna was
cleared when on Monday,
March 8, 2021, the Supreme
Court threw out most of the
criminal cases manufactured
against him and restored his
political rights, including those to
contest the October 2, 2022
Presidential elections.
The set up against Luna began
to unravel when Justice Sergio
Moro, the federal judge who
sentenced him, left the bench to
join Bolsanaro’s government as
Justice Minister in what appeared
as a reward for sending Luna to
prison.
Then in June 2019, leaked
messages between Justice Moro
and the prosecutors were
published in which the judge
gave the prosecutors tips and
strategic guidance on how to
make the case against Luna
appear credible. So the judge was
also the prosecutor.
A panicky President Bolsonaro
vowed that despite Luna’s judicial
victory, the “Brazilian people
won’t want to have a candidate
like him in 2022 and let’s not even
think about his possible election.”
But the decision is not in the
Organisations will need to make
conscious efforts to create security
strategies and implement the
same with intelligent technologydriven
security tools
hands of Bolsonaro, but that of
the electorate.
In the case of Gbagbo, a
disputed election with French
tool, Alassane Ouattara, in 2010
led to violence in which
some 3,000 people lost their lives.
The French then abducted him,
but since they had no basis
transferring him to their country,
they hauled him before the
International Criminal Court,
ICC, even when his country was
not a member of that court. He
was charged with four counts of
crimes against humanity, murder,
rape and other forms of sexual
violence, persecution and “other
inhuman acts”.
In 2019 the ICC found him
innocent of all charges but under
the guise of appealing the
decision, Gbagbo was prevented
from returning home which would
have allowed him contest the
presidential election. He
was forced to stay in Brussels
pending the appeal.
But the Presiding Judge, Chile
Eboe-Osuji, has now ruled that:
“The appeals chamber, by
majority, has found no error that
could have materially affected the
decision of the trial chamber. The
appeals chamber hereby revokes
all remaining conditions on the
release of Mr. Gbagbo and Mr.
Blé Goudé (co-defendant) as a
result of this judgement.”
The appeal judges said
the evidence against Gbagbo
was extremely weak, and
wondered why so much time and
resources were wasted for such a
long time. The simple reason is
that it was a political trial
designed to punish a vocal
African president who had
rejected French dictation,
including on award of contracts.
Gbagbo’s welcome return will
give hope to Ivorians as
Ouattara, despite an
unconstitutional third term in
office has proven to be a disaster.
attacks. COVID-19 brought some social
challenges, including latent economic
exposures across the globe. Individuals who
hitherto were dedicated to specific
employment relinquished these jobs or earned
less than required. Of course, this increased
the number of cybercriminals who attack
databases and block user accesses to demand
ransoms before providing access to legitimate
users. These ransomware attackers will be
targeting corporate entities, holding the
company’s databases in exchange for cryptocurrency
or other forms of financial
compensation.
The greatest challenge with ransomware
attacks is the reputational dent on the
organisation and the transit data accumulated
by the attackers. Even when the accesses are
restored, the attackers can still use the retained
data to blackmail the organisation, make
financial demands and publicly expose the
organisation. Ransomware is becoming more
technically advanced and sophisticated. In
2021, ransomware attacks will be the most
rampant attack across organisations.
Several entities will be targeted and
compromised. Organisations, therefore, must
prepare for ransomware prevention and
recovery. Networks should be segmented and
components hardened. Disaster recovery,
business continuity, and data recovery plans
should be in place and tested periodically.
•New forms of 5G vulnerabilities will
emerge; 5G technology will be one of the
greatest drivers and revolutions of this decade,
enabling the fastest and broadest connectivity
for humanity. As the 5G technology adoption
set in as the standard form of cloud-based data
transfer and communication, more
vulnerabilities, compromises, and new
cybersecurity threats will also emerge.
Continues online: www.vanguardngr.com
*Ikegwu, an IT expert and consultant, wrote
from Lagos