AN ANALYSIS OF LEGAL FRAMEWORK ON COMBATING CYBER CRIME IN NIGERIA

CHAPTER ONE

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

1.1         Background to the Study

With the advent of the computer age, legislatures have been struggling to redefine the law to fit crimes perpetuated by computer criminals.¹ The crime is amongst the newest and most constantly evolving areas of the law in many jurisdictions. The rise of technology and online communication has not only produced a dramatic increase in the nature of criminal activities. Criminals are using cyberspace to commit numerous cyber crimes. Growing trends of complex distributed and Internet computing raise important questions about information security and privacy.²The Information Communication Technology (ICT) revolution has had impacts in almost every area of human endeavour, from business, industry, government to not-for-profit organization; ICT has simplified business process such as sorting, summarizing, coding, editing customized and generic report generation in a real-time proceeding mode. However, ICT has also brought unintended consequences such as criminal activities, spamming, credit card frauds, ATM frauds, phishing, identify theft and other related cyber crimes. Technology has integrated nations and the world has become a global village. The economy of most nations in the world is accessible through the aid of electronic via the internet. Since the electronic market is opened to everybody (which also includes eavesdroppers and criminals) the internet is a borderless regime³. The internet is one of the fastest-growing areas of technical infrastructure development.

Over the past decades, the growth of the internet and its use afforded everyone this opportunity⁴. However, information technology revolution associated with the internet has brought about two edge functions: that is on one hand, it has contributed positive values to the world. While on the other hand, it has produced so many maladies that threaten the order of the society and also producing a new wave of crime to the world. The internet online business services, which ordinarily suppose to be a blessing as it exposes one to a lot of opportunities in various field of life is fast becoming a source of discomfort and worry due to the atrocity being perpetrated through it. Based on the threatened menace the Nigeria government has come up with a legal framework of cybercrime which is discussed and x-rayed in this work on it effectiveness on combating cybercrimes.

Cyber infrastructures are highly vulnerable to intrusions and other threats. With the pace and amount of cyber attacks, human intervention is simply not sufficient for timely attack analysis and appropriate response. The fact is that the most network-centric cyber attacks are carried out by intelligent agents such as computer worms and viruses; hence, Combating them with intelligent semi-autonomous agents that can detect, evaluate, and respond to cyber attacks has become a requirement. These so called computer-generated forces will have to be able to manage the entire process of attack response in a timely manner, attack is occurring, what the targets are and what is the appropriate response, as well as how to prioritize and prevent secondary attacks⁵. Furthermore, cyber intrusions are not localized. They are a global menace that
poses threat to any computer system in the world at a growing rate. There were times when only educated specialist could commit cyber crimes, but today with the expansion of the Internet, almost anyone has access to the knowledge and tools for committing these crimes. Conventional fixed algorithms (hard-wired logic on decision making level) have become ineffective against combating dynamically evolving cyber attacks. It has also resulted in the emergence of what appears to be some new varieties of criminal activities pose challenges for legal systems, as well as for law enforcement