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Nigeria has been pitched among countries that lose yearly to cyber fraud. The country is said to have lost well over N 7.5billion in 2012 owing to cybercrime, while the global loss is estimated at $1trillion (about N155 trillion) for 2012. According to the research by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the rising profile of cybercrime is causing great havoc globally. The report also maintained that out of the $1 trillion loss, only $390 billion was reported for obvious reasons. Following this disclosure, Nigeria's First Lady, Mrs. Patience Jonathan, will lead about 700 leaders including Mr. Ehud Barak, a former Prime Minister of Israel, Dr. Salma Abbasi, founder/CEO eWorldWide, USA, a high level team both from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to the third World Cyber security Conference next week in Abuja. Among the 700 select leaders include top government functionaries, state governors and National Assembly members. Also expected are CEOs of Corporate Nigeria, Military and Intelligence chiefs and the diplomatic community, among others. The cyber security conference will map out new strategies to secure government and business assets, personal security including Child Online Protection and online e-commerce transaction on the cyberspace. With the theme: 'Cyber Insecurity- A latent threat to national security and economic development'. Dame Jonathan, who is also the ITU-IMPACT champion on child online protection (COP), would host the global forum as part of her yearly programmed for Nigeria and the entire World with regards to Child Online Protection and cyber security. She has been working actively with stakeholders to ensure minors are protected on the internet especially from online predators and the cashless economy on CBN policy is strengthened. Ehud Barak, Israel's most decorated soldier will speak on Cyber, Physical Terrorism and Economic Development: My Experience as Israel

latest abney and associates technology news Google's Eric Schmidt Invests in Obama's Big Data Brains During the 2012 campaign, Barack Obama's reelection team had an underappreciated asset: Google's (GOOG) executive chairman, Eric Schmidt. He helped recruit talent, choose technology, and coach the campaign manager, Jim Messina, on the finer points of leading a large organization. "On election night he was in our boiler room in Chicago," says David Plouffe, then a senior White House adviser. Schmidt had a particular affinity for a group of engineers and statisticians tucked away beneath a disco ball in a darkened corner of the office known as "the Cave." The data analytics team, led by 30-year-old Dan Wagner, is credited with producing Obama's surprising 5 million-vote margin of victory. For all its acclaim, the analytics team's main achievement is often misunderstood as "microtargeting" or some variant on wooing voters. This reverses the relationship between campaign and voter at the heart of Wagner's method. Recent campaigns have employed a top-down approach to identify what they thought were vital demographic groups such as "soccer moms." Wagner's team pursued a bottom-up strategy of unifying vast commercial and political databases to understand the proclivities of individual voters likely to support Obama or be open to his message, and then sought to persuade them through personalized contact via Facebook (FB), e-mail, or a knock on the door. "I think of them as people scientists,'' says Schmidt. "They apply scientific techniques to how people will behave when confronted with a choice or a question." Obama's rout of Mitt Romney was a lesson in how this insight can translate into political strength. Traditional marketing has the same inherent limitation as traditional campaigning: It's impossible to appeal to everybody, even among the groups likeliest to favor a product. "Budweiser might target football fans with an ad s