TECHDIGEST – Google on Tuesday released insightful data on the search trends of Nigerians as the topmost in the search related to love, dating, and the special day Valentine.

Taiwo Kola-Ogunlade, Communications and Public Relations Manager, Google, West Africa said in a statement that the data provided a unique window into the hearts of residents as they sought for answers and ideas related to the occasion.

Kola-Ogunlade said, according to Google trends, Nigerians were actively searching for information and inspiration related to Valentine’s Day and the insights offered a fascinating glimpse into their thoughts and interests.

READ ALSO: Google launches Startups Accelerator for women founders in Africa

According to him, at Google, the goal is to provide the information people are looking for in the moments that matter to them.

Kola-Ogunlade said: “These trends showcase the crucial role search plays in helping Nigerians find answers to their most pressing questions, especially during special occasions such as Valentine’s Day.

‘’ It underscores the importance of search in these exciting moments.”

According to the data, Nigeria is currently the top country searching for love in 2023, and it has been the country searching the most for dating apps worldwide since 2004.

According to him, the search for “the origin of valentine” has also increased by 200 per cent in the past week.

He said that the data also showed that searches for valentine messages for boyfriend rose by 300 per cent in the past week, and valentine hair style rose by 250 per cent over the same period.

The Communications Manager said that the best dating app in the world also spiked by 250 per cent, while the origin of valentine rose by 200 per cent.

Kola-Ogunlade said that the best valentine gift for girlfriend both spiked by 120 per cent in the past week.

According to him, in addition to searching for Valentine’s Day ideas, Nigerians also searched for answers to questions relating to the celebrations.

He said that the most trending questions on Valentine’s Day over the past week included Is Valentine’s Day for Muslims, When was Valentine’s Day created among others.

Kola-Ogunlade said that while the list of the most searched questions on dates over the past year included how to ask a girl out on a date, ‘What to do on a first date’, among others.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that Google Trends is a publicly available tool that displays relative search volume across geographies, time periods and queries that people want to know about. (NAN)

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TECHDIGEST – Share your love on Valentine’s Day, but keep your credentials to yourself.

Highlights:

Valentine’s Day domains are up by 152% in January
Six percent of all new valentine’s day related domains found to be malicious, while 55% found to be suspicious
In the past month, one out of every 371 malicious emails were related to Valentine’s Day

CPR has graphed below the number of newly registered domains per month over the past three years. This year, the rise in newly registered domains jumped by a triple digit percentage, similar to 2021 and 2020.

In January, CPR witnessed a 152% increase in new domains registered, compared to December. This year, 6% of the new domains were found to be malicious and 55% were found to be suspicious. In the past month, 1 out of every 371 malicious emails were related to Valentine’s Day.

Express your love with roses (while hackers steal your private credentials)

CPR found an example of a phishing scam focused on buyer fraud. The malicious phishing email used “The Millions Roses” branding to lure victims into purchasing gifts for Valentine’s Day.

In the following example, the fraudulent email (see figure below) was sent from a spoofed address. The fraudulent email listed a company address that was different from the legitimate “The Million Roses” brand. This is a sign that the email is from a dubious source, and the website is fake. Anyone who clicked on the link in the email:

(https://firebasestorage[.]googleapis[.]com/v0/b/simo-71947[.]appspot[.]com/o/Dooring[.]html?alt=media&token=f39a49dd-96fd-4040-a3ba-de80ccc606eb) would have been redirected to a fraudulent malicious link, currently inactive, (https://jbrbro[.]page[.]link/doorring) which tried to imitate “The Million Roses” website.

Phishing is the most common type of social engineering

Phishing attacks occur when malicious actors send messages pretending to be a trusted person or entity. Phishing messages manipulate users into performing actions like installing a malicious file, clicking on a malicious link, or divulging sensitive information such as login credentials.

Social engineering is an increasingly common threat vector used in almost all security incidents. Social engineering attacks, like phishing, are often combined with other threats, such as malware, code injection, and network attacks.

Furthermore, phishing is the number one cause of ransomware. Since these attacks are specifically designed to exploit the human nature of wanting a good deal, it is extremely important to prevent these attacks from ever reaching their desired victims – because just one “wrong click” can cause tremendous damage.

How do you avoid falling victim to phishing scams? Here is what we recommend to spot the signs and stay protected:

Threats or a Sense of Urgency – Emails that threaten negative consequences should always be treated with skepticism. Another strategy is to use urgency to encourage or demand immediate action. Phishers hope that by reading the email in a hurry, they will not thoroughly scrutinize the content and will not discover inconsistencies.

Message Style – An immediate indication of phishing is when a message is written with inappropriate language or tone. For example, if a colleague from work sounds overly casual, or a close friend uses formal language, this should trigger suspicion. Recipients of the message should check for anything else that could indicate a phishing message.

Unusual Requests – If an email requires you to perform non-standard actions, it could indicate that the email is malicious. For example, if an email claims to be from a specific IT team and asks for software to be installed, but these activities are usually handled centrally by the IT department, the email is probably malicious.

Linguistic Errors – Spelling and grammar errors are another sign of phishing emails. Most companies use spell check, so these typos should raise suspicion because the email may not originate from the claimed source.

Web Address Inconsistencies – Another easy way to identify potential phishing attacks is mismatched email addresses, links, and domain names. It’s a good rule of thumb to always cross reference previous communication with the email address.

Recipients should hover over a link in an email before clicking it to confirm the actual link destination. If the email is believed to be sent by The U.S. Postal Service, but the domain of the email address does not contain “usps.com”, that is a sign of a phishing email.

Request for Credentials, Payment Information or Other Personal Details – In many phishing emails, attackers create fake login pages linked from emails that appear to be official. The fake login page typically has a login box or a request for financial account information. If the email is unexpected, the recipient should not enter login credentials or click the link. As a precaution, recipients should directly visit the website they think is the source of the email.

Tips:

ALWAYS be suspicious of password reset emails: By sending a fake password reset email that directs you to a lookalike phishing site, attackers can convince you to type in your account credentials and send those to them. If you receive an unsolicited password reset email, always visit the website directly (don’t click on embedded links) and change your password to something different on that site (and any other sites with the same password)

Never EVER share your credentials: Credential theft is a common goal of cyberattacks. Many people reuse the same usernames and passwords across many different accounts, so stealing the credentials for a single account is likely to give an attacker access to a number of the user’s online accounts. As a result, phishing attacks are designed to steal login credentials in various ways

BEWARE of too good to be true buying offers: as they are really too good and not true… An 80% discount on a new iPhone or an item of jewelry is usually not a reliable or trustworthy purchase opportunity
ALWAYS verify you are ordering online from an authentic source: Do NOT click on promotional links in emails, instead Google your desired retailer and click the link from the Google results page

Check Point’s anti-phishing solutions include different products that address different attack vectors – email, mobile, endpoint and network. The statistics and data used in this report present data detected by Check Point’s Threat Prevention technologies, stored and analyzed in ThreatCloud. ThreatCloud provides real-time threat intelligence derived from hundreds of millions of sensors worldwide, over networks, endpoints and mobiles. The intelligence is enriched with AI-based engines and exclusive research data from the Check Point Research – The intelligence & Research Arm of Check Point.

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By Princewell N. Achor, Ph.D

TECH DIGEST – The concept of love can be understood from multiple lenses. A few of the lenses we help us to understand the purpose and the context of this article: how technologically-mediated changes affect love, define the context to which people experience, seek or love, particularly as they celebrate valentine’s Day.

As the world celebrates the Valentine’s Day, different perspectives or interpretations of love are shared by secular-minded and religion-minded opinion moulders — all in a bid to defend the reason for or condemn the ‘annual love (ritual) event’ (ALE). Love has been described as ale that intoxicates when emotions are high and caution thrown to the winds. Exponents of this line of thought depict love in different ale: blue love, red love, and white or pure love.

Each of these depictions has been philosophically and literally interpreted to suit the context of the interpreter. Sociological cum traditional perspectives categorize love in terms of philia love, erotic love and agape love. I’m not inclined to specifically devote attention to each of these love typologies; this is, because, I assume that, they have received enough explanation in the mainstream literature holistically devoted to love, romance and dating. What I intend to do in this commentary is to pigeon-hole the concepts to suit my context, taking cognizance of the various sheds of opinions and interpretations of love.

I am not a love doctor nor sex therapist; I don’t intend to be one in future, but I’m concerned with the disruptive tendencies technology poses to traditionally-human-mediated love: how it’s expressed, valued, practised and sought by humans either in the family context or in the worldly context.

However, I will give more attention to a model of love (romantic relationship) which our young people have been erroneously celebrating during Valentine. This model of love has ethical implications. I will comment on the ethical implications and worries as it relates primarily to Valentine’s Day celebration and other occasions that young people meet to express love.

*Philosophies and
value of love*

In this article, I assume that love, is a complex ‘‘Biopsychosocial’’ phenomenon — whose aspects can be studied from both a scientific and social, experiential or philosophical point of views. For the purposes of our discussion and to properly situate the context of which my arguments are based, I adopt the dual approach to interpret love.

One aspect of the dual perspective include aspects of love that are open to scientific investigation (i.e. Neurochemistry of romantic attachment, the evolutionary history of human pair bonding, and those aspects of love that people experience in terms of associated hormones, behaviour, etc. The amplified version of this distinguishes lust, attraction, and attachment; it tries to investigate the neurochemistry and biological dimensions of love.

The other aspect of the dual perspective recognizes love as a ‘psychological and social-cultural’ phenomenon. This aspect has been argued to be subjectively experienced in a certain way, while its values lie within a given cultural or historical context. This kind or aspect of love is often depicted in arts, plays, movies, songs, poetry, and philosophy.

Arising from this point of view, is, the need to understand how people think about love, what they value about love and the way people may visualise love as a normative phenomenon. This second aspect of our dual perspective gives philosophers clues when they write about love or theorize about love. However, we cannot isolate either of the aspects of the dual perspective in explaining love.

*What is the value of love?*
Different scholars have designated love as a value —something we all desire, plan our lives around and put high premium on our lists of priorities. Many positive-effects or added benefits of love are assumed to be conditional depending on individual’s assessment indicators: ‘‘it might make us happy, it might be good for our health and well-being’’.

However, philosophers and other scholars assume that love is not purely valued as a means to other goods; rather, it’s usually valued as an end in itself. In course of my research, I have observed that, in the list of people’s most important goods in life, love appears to be given topmost priority. This invariably makes love to have an intrinsic value. Given that opinion differs, ‘‘when people value love, they may have different ideas or association regarding what love is or what it should be in order to qualify as the particular sort of good that it is’’. People often differ in the exact qualities they attribute to love, and according to Nyholm, Danaher and Earp in their latest writings on love, these qualities, ‘‘may also evolve over time at a wider cultural level ’’.
Irrespective of social-cultural differences between different qualities and associations people attribute to love, there are ideas that are common across cultures.

Some of the shared ideas have dominated philosophical discussions of love in Western societies and expressed in pop songs and poetry. I will share a few of these ideas here, in order to keep track of our context and concept of love and the disruption caused by technologically-mediated changes to how love is understood, valued and appreciated.

The first idea sees love as the existence and feeling that lovers are a ‘‘good match’’. In other words, two lovers of opposite sex think or believe that they are ‘made for each other (that is a sort of soul mates). Because of their shared values, interests, likes and dislikes, etc; both lovers feel that they belong together, seen as one and regard each other as ‘better or other half’. The second notion indicates that love involves two or more persons that mutually value one another for their individual unique attributes. They see each other as irreplaceable. By contrast, when there is absence of respect to each other’s individual’s unique attributes, there tend to be a ‘’clash with people’s perception about love as a means of valuing someone for who they are’’. The third notion associates love with a special kind of relationship, characterised by some level of commitment. This commitment could be formal (in terms of marriage) or less formal (in terms of sincere plan to stick by one another). The bottom-line is that, irrespective type of commitment, it is envisaged that people who love each other should be willing to stay in it or stick by one another for a long time through thick and thin, in sickness and in health.

*Technologies and value of love*

The generic value of love can be disrupted or enhanced through the use of technology. There is need to emphasize here, that, the technologies we use have impact on human life, though this notion can be contested. Through the Instrumental theory of technology, technologies are tools used for particular purposes: these technologies ‘‘significantly affect how we experience, perceive, and value things, including ourselves’’. There are many ways this can happen — they affect what we are able to do, what we pay attention to, what becomes most important in our life and how we perceive events, objects and our environment. All this invariably affects what we value and how we value it. The social media technology comes handy in explaining how technology-mediated changes affect how we love, express love, value love and understand love.
Through curated information, this technology allows one to instantaneously make choices about whom to love, how and when to express/profess love or even seek love based on distorted information. A lot of people now define love based on distorted information they have about someone, and their attitude about love is shaped by personality of people they meet in the digital domain. Some people place much value on internet love or dating, which is often propagated by deceits, lies and misplacement of social and cultural values. We must acknowledge here, that, there are added values social media technologies or platforms have brought to social interactions, expression of love, and in the sustenance of mutually beneficial relationships.
Again, social media and other dating websites, love chat rooms have added new dimension to ‘match making, the old practice of paring two love birds (man and woman) for the possible marriage or relationship. The match maker post photographs of the intended love birds in a dating site or post separately to their social media handles. Digital natives and other netizens now rely on the social media validations of an active user of social networking sites to define or select who to have a crush on or approach for intimate relationship. Unfortunately, values like compatibility, ethically-defined and observable traits are not given consideration as people seek love and affection in the digital domain.
The disruptive nature of technology has also impacted on how love is practised and consummated. Social media and other internet-enabled platforms facilitate exchange of nude pictures by ‘‘so-called lovers’’, while internet or online sex has become a new normal for satisfying lovers sexual desires and intimacy..
Emerging and future technologies such as sex robots, love drugs, anti-love drugs, algorithms that track, quantify and gamify romantic relationship have changed and continue to alter how we understand and value love. There are ethical concerns or worries associated with this trend of life. The digital natives are neck dip into technology-aided life style and are now prone to exploring options to enhance their sex life
Young people now indulge in love enhancement biotechnologies or what is popularly referred to as love drugs: they act on the biological dimensions of love which influence lust, attraction, attachment and romantic aspects of their lives. Research has shown that these drugs are used as stimulant ‘‘to sustain or improve relationships that are worth maintaining (“pro-love drugs”).’’ High intake of these drugs is prevalent during valentine celebration.
Humanoid robots and avatars is another technology that has affected the context of love as espoused in this article.

The use of Sex robot as sex partners is trending. They are used for sex or romantic partnership with humans. Though they are created for overtly sexual purposes, the manufacturers are now marketing them as’ true companions’: that is artificial humans that can engage emotionally with the user. Sex robots have been equally promoted or used as a form of romantic partner.

*Ethical Implications and concluding remarks*
There are ethical implications of technologically-mediated changes to how love is perceived, practised or understood during the celebration of Saint Valentine’s Day.

First, It is ethically wrong for people to equate ‘animated companionship’ that robot offers to that of human companionship in real life romantic relationship. Second, over indulgence in love enhancement biotechnologies as a way to celebrate valentine day is ethically and morally wrong. Romantic love or romance is not originally associated with Valentine and indulging in the use of technology to alter the meaning of Valentine day should be jettisoned by our young people. However, the use social media technology can positively be used to promote the essence of valentine: sharing of selfless love and affection, giving of gifts to loved ones, friends. E-electronic payment platforms should be used to send money to loved ones. True companionship cannot be found in the use of sex drugs and Sex robots, virtual boy friends or virtual girl friends. They only create artificial behaviourism, which is outward behaviour that deemphasizes people’s inner feeling.

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