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Unstructured Supplementary Services Data (USSD) is a menu driven, real time communication technology used for value added services. It is adopted by banks for financial transactions due to its ease of operation. However existing USSD are used by fraudster to commit identity theft through Subscriber Identification Module (SIM) swap, phone theft and kidnap, in other to access funds in the bank. One of the reasons this is made possible is because existing USSD platforms use Automated Teller Machine (ATM) Personal Identification Number (PIN) as second level authenticator and this compromises the ATM channel and violets one of the stated guidelines for USSD operation in Nigeria. More so, the PIN is entered bare on the platform and so can easily be stolen by shoulder surfing. Therefore, in this paper we developed and simulated an improved USSD security model for banking operations in Nigeria. The security of existing USSD platform was enhanced using answer to a secret question as another level of authentication. This was with the view to minimise identity theft. This secret question is registered in the bank during account opening for new customers while existing customers will have to update their details in the banks data base before registering for USSD services. This is done the same way customers verify their ATM PIN in the bank. Hence the answer is known by the customer alone. The model was implemented using php on XAMPP platform and simulated using hubtel USSD mocker. Results showed that security of the proposed system was enhanced through another level of authentication provided by the answer to the security question.

Severe outbreaks of infectious disease occur throughout the world with some reaching the level of international pandemic: Coronavirus (COVID-19) is the most recent to do so. In this paper, a mechanism is set out using Zipf's law to establish the accuracy of international reporting of COVID-19 cases via a determination of whether an individual country's COVID-19 reporting follows a power-law for confirmed, recovered, and death cases of COVID-19. The probability of Zipf's law (P-values) for COVID-19 confirmed cases show that Uzbekistan has the highest P-value of 0.940, followed by Belize (0.929), and Qatar (0.897). For COVID-19 recovered cases, Iraq had the highest P-value of 0.901, followed by New Zealand (0.888), and Austria (0.884). Furthermore, for COVID-19 death cases, Bosnia and Herzegovina had the highest P-value of 0.874, followed by Lithuania (0.843), and Morocco (0.825). China, where the COVID-19 pandemic began, is a significant outlier in recording P-values lower than 0.1 for the confirmed, recovered, and death cases. This raises important questions, not only for China, but also any country whose data exhibits P-values below this threshold. The main application of this work is to serve as an early warning for World Health Organization (WHO) and other health regulatory bodies to perform more investigations in countries where COVID-19 datasets deviate significantly from Zipf's law. To this end, this paper provide a tool for illustrating Zipf's law P-values on a global map in order to convey the geographic distribution of reporting anomalies.

Investigations towards studying terrorist activities have recently attracted a great amount of research interest. In this paper, we investigate the use of the Apriori algorithm on the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) for forensic investigation purposes. Recently, the Apriori algorithm, which could be considered a forensic tool, has been used to study terrorist activities and patterns across the world. As such, our motivation is to utilise the Apriori algorithm approach on the GTD to study terrorist activities and the areas/states in Nigeria with high frequencies of terrorist activities. We observe that the most preferred method of terrorist attacks in Nigeria is through armed assault. Again, our experiment shows that attacks in Nigeria are mostly successful. Also, we observe from our investigations that most terrorists in Nigeria are not suicidal. The main application of this work can be used by forensic experts to assist law enforcement agencies in decision making when handling terrorist attacks in Nigeria.