Professional Analysis of Cybercrime Legislation Adequacy Under the Cybercrimes Act 2015 and Its 2024 Amendment: Implications for ICT Practitioners and Digital Business

The Cybercrimes (Prohibition, Prevention, etc.) Act 2015 and its 2024 amendment represent Nigeria's primary legislative framework for combating digital crime, and their adequacy for addressing emerging cybercrime patterns and protecting ICT practitioners and digital businesses requires systematic professional analysis. This study professionally analyses the legislative adequacy of the Cybercrimes Act 2015 and its 2024 amendment for managing contemporary cybercrime threats and their implications for ICT practitioners. A doctrinal legal-ICT analysis methodology was applied, combining statutory interpretation analysis of the Act's provisions with a survey of 90 ICT legal practitioners and digital business managers in Lagos, Abuja, and Kano on their professional experiences with Act provisions. Provisions analysed include offence definitions for cyberstalking, cyber fraud, and critical infrastructure attacks, penalty structures, jurisdictional provisions, and the 2024 amendment's new data breach reporting obligations. Descriptive statistics and qualitative legal analysis were applied. Available cybercrime law literature from Nigeria identifies definitional imprecision in key offence categories, insufficient provisions for cloud-hosted crime attribution, and inadequate protection for ethical hackers engaged in legitimate security research as the primary legislative gaps. The Cybercrime Law Adequacy Framework of UNODC and comparative analysis from Ghana's Electronic Transactions Act and Kenya's Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act provide the professional reference. Recommendations address offence definition precision, safe harbour provisions for security researchers, and cross-border cybercrime cooperation treaty obligations. Keywords: Cybercrimes Act, cybercrime legislation, ICT practitioners, digital business, Nigeria.