Cyber security expert goads media on in fight against galamsey
The Principal Consultant of the Cyber Security and Investigations Bureau, Mr Albert Antwi-Boasiako has urged media houses in the country not to give up on their fight against 'galamsey' in spite of cyber-attacks directed at their news portals.
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According to him, the recent attacks on the various news portals in the country appear to have a correlation with the war the Ghanaian media have waged on galamsey.
He said some news portals have already fallen victims to the cyber-attacks while several others have also been targeted.
Mr Antwi-Boasiako said this at a one-day training workshop organised by Mobile Telecommunication Network (MTN) Ghana Limited, for some selected media practitioners in Accra on mobile money.
The mobile money capacity building workshop was also aimed at equipping the participants with information on how cyber fraudsters operate using the mobile money service.
News Portals
Mr Antwi-Boasiako said the attacks would continue if the various managers of the news portals fail to adopt strict cyber security measures to protect their sites against such attacks.
He has also called on the government to strengthen its cyber security space as the attacks could be extended to state assets and installations, including banks and telecommunication services.
Solution
He, however, advised that managers of news portals ought to periodically check the traffic their websites received.
That, Mr Antwi-Boasiako said, would enable them to detect any abnormal traffic that cyber attackers sent to such news portals.
He said cybercrime prevention was not just an obligation but a moral call on all who have the capacity to do so to help their societies to weed out such social evils.
Touching on mobile money fraud, he said three kinds of mobile money fraud such as customer driven fraud, agent driven fraud and other fraud schemes had been identified.
Mr Antwi-Boasiako said all the various kinds of mobile money fraud could be prevented if mobile money users were educated on the modus operandi of the mobile money fraudsters.
Police
The General Manager of the MTN Mobile Money Limited, Mr Eli Hini, said the company had liaised with the Ghana Police Service to track down mobile money fraudsters and that a number such fraudsters have been arrested.
He said once people become aware of the activities of cyber fraudsters, it would enable them to avert such crimes.
Mr Hini said since the mobile money service was introduced in 2009, it had registered about nine million users and had over 63,000 merchants across the country.
Training
He said the service has enabled many of Ghana’s unbanked population to perform basic transactions.
He, however, said in recent times, the managers of the mobile money service have detected some activities of certain individuals who wanted to defraud some customers of the service.
Mr Hini said MTN-Ghana had put in place adequate measures to protect the monies of its mobile money users.
He, however, urged the mobile money users not to expose their PIN numbers to other parties.