The United States and other countries face roughly the same cybersecurity threats, although there are some differences. The United States must protect itself from phishing attacks, the United States accounts for 60% of the world’s attacks. Phishing attacks are trying to get someone to fall for something that is made up, for example like an email saying that a person’s power bill is not paid. People will click on that in the email where it will send them to a site that is not operated by that company, and they will effectively steal money from that person thinking they are paying their power bill when they are not. Businesses capture the brunt of phishing attacks which averages $20,070 per business. Most of phishing attacks come from China, Russia, Ukraine, the United States, and Brazil. Another type of cybersecurity threat that happens in the United States is ransomware, where the attacker uses information on your computer or holds your computer virtually hostage in order to get money from the victim to unlock it.

            In Nigeria, the cybersecurity threat is different. For example, in most cybersecurity threats in the United States and in Europe, the attacker wants money or some sort of information. In Nigeria, the threat is not just hold anything or items on a computer for money, they hold people. One example of this is that a person could see something online, like in an email, the victim might take the bait and go along with it, possibly giving them money. Later down the line if they don’t realize it is a scam, it could turn out to be something worse the victim can fly to a country like Nigeria and the person get held hostage for money. Although this type of fraud consists in African countries, this does happen in the United States as well.

Kigerl, A. (2016). Cyber Crime Nation Typeologies. International Journal of Cyber Criminology, 10(2).