Safeguarding Online Payment Systems from Cyber- Attacks during and beyond Covid-19 Pandemic - A Technology Threat Avoidance Approach

Abstract

The use of online payment systems witnessed tremendous increase during the COVID-19 lockdown period. Lockdown became necessary and was enforced by the government of most countries of the world, upon the advice of the WHO as an effective method to check the spread of the disease. This left most citizens with online services as the only best alternative. This paper investigates the activities of cybercriminals and its effects on the use of Debit cards and Webpages payment modalities among some undergraduates in Nigeria. Online questionnaire and convenience sampling technique were deployed, to elicit information from universities that shifted onto online payment systems during the period of pandemic. Cronbach Alpha tests and Cross-tabulation with Chi-square were carried out using SPSS version 20 statistical package to analyze 118 valid data collected. Face and content validities of research instrument were done by two experts in the field of cyber-security. Pilot test was done and the corrected version of the questionnaire was administered. Reliability tests on Safeguard measure (0.72), Cyber-Treats (0.95), Impacts of cyber-attacks (0.79) and Challenges with online payments (0.90) showed acceptable Cronbach’s Alpha values. Our investigation showed that respondents experienced Spam, Malware, Web-application attacks, Phishing and Identity thefts among other attacks during the lockdowns. We conclude that from a safety perspective, this study emphasizes the use of safeguard measures such as the use of strong passwords, secured webpage, licensed antivirus, keeping the PIN number and password secret by every online user are very crucial to mitigate the activities of cybercriminals.