Nigeria Government blocked over 12m cyber-attacks during Presidential elections;

The Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy has made it known that a total of 12,988,978 cyber-attacks were blocked originating within and outside Nigeria during the presidential and National Assembly elections.

This was disclosed today by the ministry’s spokesperson, Uwa Sulaiman, in a statement where he noted  that in the run-up to the 2023 general elections, there had been an “astronomical increase” in cyber threats to the country’s cyberspace.

Sulaiman stated that a series of hacking attempts were recorded, adding that the centres successfully blocked these attacks and escalated them to the relevant institutions for appropriate action.

Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Prof. Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami

He noted that from Friday, February 24 to Monday, February 27, the minister had directed all the parastatals to enhance their 24/7 monitoring of the networks and traffic for potential attacks.

“Generally, threats to public websites and portals averaged around 1,550,000 daily. However, this skyrocketed to 6,997,277 on Presidential Election Day,” Sulaiman said.

“The committee’s activity started on 24th February and ended on 28th February 2023.

“During this period, a series of hacking attempts were recorded, including Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), email and IPS attacks, SSH Login Attempts, Brute force Injection attempts, Path Traversal, Detection Evasion, and Forceful Browsing.

“A total of 12,988,978 attacks were recorded, originating from both within and outside Nigeria.”

Dolupo Balogun

Written by BoomRadioNG