Prof Isa Pantami, The Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, has revealed that the Nigerian government blocked about 12.9 million cyberattacks during the recently concluded Presidential and National Assembly elections. The Minister disclosed that these attacks were launched both within and outside Nigeria. On election day, 6.9 million attacks were recorded and blocked.
In a statement by his media aide, Uwa Suleiman, the Minister said that days before the election, there was an alarming increase in cyber threats to Nigeria’s cyberspace, as revealed by threat intelligence. However, the sophisticated infrastructure on the ground at different government agencies successfully blocked all the attacks.
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The Minister thanked President Muhammadu Buhari for supporting government agencies in their duties. He also commended the efforts of the cybersecurity centre established under his Ministry, as well as the National Information Technology (NITDA) ‘s Computer Emergency Readiness and Response Team (CERT), the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) ‘s Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT), and Galaxy Backbone (GBB) ‘s Security Operations Centre (SOC). Pantami emphasized that the parastatals, under the Ministry’s supervision, played a vital role in providing an encouraging environment for the successful conduct of a credible, free, fair, and transparent election. He further explained that 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.
