Cybersecurity Awareness, Everyday Practices and Privacy Behaviour among Students of the University of Lagos: A Survey-Based Case Study

Nigerian students do their banking, learning, borrowing and socialising on the same phone, which makes them easy and frequent targets for online fraud. This article reports an anonymous online survey of 384 students of the University of Lagos, drawn from undergraduate and postgraduate levels, on what they know about cybersecurity, what they actually do, what has happened to them, and what they expect from the university. Knowledge was uneven. Nearly everyone (99.2%) knew that a bank never asks for an OTP, yet fewer than half answered correctly on password reuse (26.3%), the padlock icon (23.7%), public Wi-Fi (29.2%) and antivirus software (45.8%). The same pattern showed in behaviour: 99.2% lock their devices and 95.1% never share OTPs, but 78.6% often use their school password on other sites and 92.2% sometimes use public Wi-Fi for banking. Incident exposure was high, with 62.2% reporting loan-app harassment, 54.9% a phishing or scam message and 26.6% money lost to online fraud. Almost all respondents (99.5%) had seen a deepfake, while 2.9% felt able to tell AI-written scam messages from genuine ones. Some 99.2% asked for more training. Six structured problems and matching recommendations are set out. The data are self-reported, cross-sectional and drawn from a convenience sample, so the results describe stated knowledge and habits, not measured security outcomes.