GASPRO International Journal of Eminent Scholars

ABSTRACT The study was carried out to strategically assess dark web and cybercrime threats in Nigeria. The population of this study comprised all professionals in computer science, computer engineering and security agents who have been exposed to cyber crimes, cyber security and general computer science. The study adopted a descriptive survey design, while stratified random sampling technique was used in selecting 400 respondents. The instrument for data collection, which was tagged “Dark Web and Cybercrime Threat Mitigation Questionnaire (DWCTMQ)”, was administered to the respondents and used for the study. The instrument was vetted by experts in computer science as well as test and measurement before the reliability test was conducted with 40 computer experts who did not form parts of the main work and it produced the average reliability coefficient of 0.87, proving the instrument to be reliable for the study. Data collected were analysed using percentage analysis, mean statistics and goodness of fit chi-square analysis. From the results of the data analysis, it was observed that there is high level of dark web and cyber crimes activities in Nigeria. It was also observed that there are various types of threats caused by dark web and cyber crimes in Nigeria including stealing of data, havoc on individuals and organizations by the criminals, advanced persistent threats, distributed denial of service attacks, botnets, destructive malware, the growing challenge of ransom ware. etc. One of the recommendations was that cyber security should be seen by all as a shared responsibility which requires the attention of a broad range of stakeholders with effective public/private partnership that incorporates businesses and institutions of all sizes to produce successful outcomes in identifying and addressing threats, vulnerabilities and overall risk in cyberspace. Key Words: Dark Web, Cyber Crimes Activities, Cyber Threats, Nigeria