Technology
16.8 million Nigerians are Cyberattacked through Ad-supported Apps
A multinational cybersecurity business named Kaspersky conducted a study on the threat environment in a few African nations, recording over 28 million malware assaults and 102 million potentially undesirable apps in the smartphones of numerous people in Kenya, South Africa, and Nigeria.
According to a statement made by Kaspersky, the proliferation of PUAs and hacks occurred over a seven-month period.
According to the cybersecurity and antivirus company, a PUA is any software that a user did not choose to install on their device. The ad-supported software is one example of such a program (or adware).
These are pieces of software that show unsolicited adverts on computers. When they infect mobile devices, they are referred to as malware. Pornware is a type of PUA that shows pornographic content on devices.
Some PUAs are lawfully designed applications, however, they may be exploited to pose unique risks to users, such as the distribution of harmful software such as spyware, viruses, or other malware. Cybercriminals may purposefully conceal malware into PUAs, advertising websites, or supporting software.
According to the cybersecurity firm, not only are PUAs growing more widespread, but they are also more effective than traditional malicious software. Researchers have found that attacks on PUAs users occur four times more frequently than attacks on traditional malicious software.
For example, if over 16.8 million PUAs were detected in Nigeria over a seven-month period, 3.8 million malware assaults were also revealed to have occurred more than four times in the nation over that same period of time.
“The reason ‘grey zone’ software is becoming more popular is that it is more difficult to detect at first and that if the program is identified, its designers will not be deemed hackers “explained Kaspersky security expert Denis Parinov. “The issue with them is that consumers are not always aware that they agreed to the installation of such apps on their device, and in some situations, such apps are abused or used as a cover for malware downloads.”
In South Africa, around 10 million malicious software assaults were detected, and 43 million Puas were discovered throughout the review period. According to Kaspersky, internet users in Kenya face greater threats, with over 14 million malicious software discovered, and 43 million PUAs identified.
These kinds of cyberattacks were also popular in Kenya but were largely carried out by unlicensed and dishonest financial institutions.
Because of this, many people who wanted to get involved in trading started to search Capex Broker review, in order to find out whether or not a certain broker was among the scam financial companies and were licensed or not, as everyone who advertised something online was thought to be a fake.
However, it is also perilous for Nigeria since the potential harm these assaults might inflict on the local digital realm is tremendous.
Potentially unwanted apps (PUAs) are apps that are not dangerous in and of themselves. However, they typically have a detrimental impact on user experience. Adware, for example, floods user devices with advertisements; aggressive monetization software spreads unwanted paid offers; and downloaders may install other apps on the device, including harmful ones.
The researchers discovered that PUAs infect users nearly four times more frequently than regular malware when computing interim findings of threat landscape activity in African countries. They also eventually reach more people: for example, in South Africa, the virus would target 415,000 people in seven months, whereas PUA would target 736,000.
This specific danger, according to Geoffrey Cleaves, Head of Secure-D at Upstream, preys on the most susceptible.
“The fact that the virus is pre-installed on smartphones purchased in their millions by normally low-income households tells you all you need to know about what the business is now up against,” according to him.
According to Kaspersky’s research, three out of every ten devices are in danger of having undeletable applications on their phones, making them an ideal target for dangerous malware.
According to the Interpol Cybercrime COVID-19 Impact, phishing is the most serious concern worldwide, followed by malware and ransomware, harmful sites, and fake news. According to the research, the COVID-19-related attacks were mostly social engineering attempts.
Malware and adware may infiltrate devices in two ways. Freeware can install malicious software or advertising applications on a device.
Shareware is software that is shared for the purpose of the trial, whereas freeware is software that may be used for free. Users can obtain adware on their devices by visiting infected websites, which results in the download and installation of software that is never used.
PUA may be used to steal money from unknowing users in addition to spamming your device. According to the paper, PUA programs are not often deemed harmful in and of themselves. However, they typically have a detrimental impact on user experience.
Adware, for example, floods the user’s device with advertisements; aggressive monetization software spreads unrequested paid offers; and downloaders may install other, often harmful, apps on the device.
By Adedapo Adesanya
Lagos State’s representative, Team Nevo, won the 3 Million Technical Talent (3MTT) South-West Regional Hackathon, on Tuesday, December 9, 2025.
The host state took the victory defeating pitches from other south west states, including Oyo, Ogun, Osun, Ekiti, and Ondo States.
This regional hackathon was a major moment for the 3MTT Programme, bringing together young innovators from across the South-West to showcase practical solutions in AI, software development, cybersecurity, data analysis, and other key areas of Nigeria’s digital future.
Launched by the Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, the hackathon brought together talented young innovators from across the Southwest region to showcase their digital solutions in areas such as Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning, software development, data analysis, and cybersecurity, among others.
“This event not only highlights the potential of youth in South West but also advances the digital economy, fosters innovation, and creates job opportunities for our young people,” said Mr Oluwaseyi Ayodele, the Lagos State Community Manager.
Winning the hackaton was Team Nevo, made up of Miss Lydia Solomon and Mr Teslim Sadiq, whose inclusive AI learning tool which tailors academic learning experiences to skill sets of students got the top nod, with N500,000 in prize money.
Team Oyo represented by Microbiz, an AI business tool solution, came in second place winning N300,000 while Team Ondo’s Fincoach, a tool that guides individuals and businesses in marking smarter financial decisions, came third with N200,000 in prize money.
Others include The Frontiers (Team Osun), Ecocycle (Team Ogun), and Mindbud (Team Ekiti).
Speaking to Business Post, the lead pitcher for Team Nevo, Miss Solomon, noted, “It was a very lovely experience and the opportunity and access that we got was one of a kind,” adding that, “Expect the ‘Nevolution’ as we call it, expect the transformation of the educational sector and how Nevo is going to bring inclusion and a deeper level of understanding and learning to schools all around Nigeria.”
Earlier, during his keynote speech, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Sterling Bank, Mr Abubakar Suleiman, emphasised the need for Nigeria’s budding youth population to tap into the country’s best comparative advantage, drawing parallels with commodities and resources like cocoa, soyabeans, and uranium.
“Tech is our best bet to architect a comparative advantage. The work we are doing with technologies are very vital to levelling the playing field.”
By Aduragbemi Omiyale
One of the high points of the 2025 re:Invent was the unveiling of Graviton5, the fifth generation of custom Arm-based server processors from Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Many tech enthusiasts believe that the company pushed the limits with Graviton5, its most powerful and efficient CPU, frontier agents that can work autonomously for days, an expansion of the Amazon Nova model family, Trainium3 UltraServers, and AWS AI Factories suitable for implementing AI infrastructure in customers’ existing data centres.
Graviton5—the company’s most powerful and efficient CPU
As cloud workloads grow in complexity, organizations face a persistent challenge to deliver faster performance at lower costs and meet sustainability commitments without trade-offs.
AWS’ new Graviton5-based Amazon EC2 M9g delivers up to 25% higher performance than its previous generation, with 192 cores per chip and 5x larger cache.
For the third year in a row, more than half of new CPU capacity added to AWS is powered by Graviton, with 98 per cent of the top 1,000 EC2 customers—including Adobe, Airbnb, Epic Games, Formula 1, Pinterest, SAP, and Siemens—already benefiting from Graviton’s price performance advantages.
Expansion of Nova family of models and pioneers “open training” with Nova Forge
Amazon is expanding its Nova portfolio with four new models that deliver industry-leading price-performance across reasoning, multimodal processing, conversational AI, code generation, and agentic tasks. Nova Forge pioneers “open training,” giving organizations access to pre-trained model checkpoints and the ability to blend proprietary data with Amazon Nova-curated datasets.
Nova Act achieves breakthrough 90% reliability for browser-based UI automation workflows built by early customers. Companies like Reddit are using Nova Forge to replace multiple specialized models with a single solution, while Hertz accelerated development velocity by 5x with Nova Act.
Addition of 3 frontier agents, a new class of AI agents that work as an extension of your software development team
Frontier agents represent a step-change in what agents can do. They’re autonomous, scalable, and can work for hours or days without intervention. AWS announced three frontier agents—Kiro autonomous agent, AWS Security Agent, and AWS DevOps Agent. Kiro autonomous agent acts as a virtual developer for your team, AWS Security Agent is your own security consultant, and AWS DevOps Agent is your on-call operational team.
Companies, including Commonwealth Bank of Australia, SmugMug, and Wester Governors University have used one or more of these agents to transform the software development lifecycle.
Unveiling Trainium3 UltraServers
As AI models grow in size and complexity, training cutting-edge models requires infrastructure investments that only a handful of organizations can afford.
Amazon EC2 Trn3 UltraServers, powered by AWS’s first 3nm AI chip, pack up to 144 Trainium3 chips into a single integrated system, delivering up to 4.4x more compute performance and 4x greater energy efficiency than Trainium2 UltraServers.
Customers achieve 3x higher throughput per chip while delivering 4x faster response times, reducing training times from months to weeks. Customers including Anthropic, Karakuri, Metagenomi, NetoAI, Ricoh, and Splash Music are reducing training and inference costs by up to 50 per cent with Trainium, while Decart is achieving 4x faster inference for real-time generative video at half the cost of GPUs, and Amazon Bedrock is already serving production workloads on Trainium3.
By Adedapo Adesanya
The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) has issued an advisory on new vulnerabilities in ChatGPT that could expose users to data-leakage attacks.
According to the advisory, researchers discovered seven vulnerabilities affecting GPT-4o and GPT-5 models that allow attackers to manipulate ChatGPT through indirect prompt injection.
The agency explained that hidden instructions placed inside webpages, comments, or Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) can trigger unintended commands during regular browsing, summarisation, or search actions.
“By embedding hidden instructions in webpages, comments, or crafted URLs, attackers can cause ChatGPT to execute unintended commands simply through normal browsing, summarization, or search actions,” they stated.
The warning followed rising concerns about AI-powered tools interacting with unsafe web content and the growing dependence on ChatGPT for business, research, and public-sector tasks.
NITDA added that some flaws allow the bypassing of safety controls by masking malicious content behind trusted domains.
Other weaknesses take advantage of markdown rendering bugs, enabling hidden instructions to pass undetected.
It explained that in severe cases, attackers can poison ChatGPT’s memory, forcing the system to retain malicious instructions that influence future conversations
They stated that while OpenAI has fixed parts of the issue, Large-Language Models (LLMs) still struggle to reliably separate genuine user intent from malicious data.
The Agency warned that these vulnerabilities could lead to a range of cybersecurity threats, including unauthorised actions carried out by the model; unintended exposure of user information; manipulated or misleading outputs; and long-term behavioural changes caused by memory poisoning, among others.
It advised Nigerians, businesses, and government institutions to adopt several precautionary steps to stay safe. These include limiting or disabling the browsing and summarisation of untrusted websites within enterprise environments and enabling features like browsing or memory only when necessary.
It also recommended regular updates to deployed GPT-4o and GPT-5 models to ensure known vulnerabilities are patched.
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