During the recently finished Presidential and National Assembly elections, a total of 12,9 million cyberattacks from inside as well as outside the country were recorded.
Prof. Isa Pantami, Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, revealed on Tuesday that over 6.9 million attacks were reported on election day alone.
According to Pantami, the attacks were effectively thwarted by the government agencies tasked with protecting the nation’s cyberspace due to their advanced infrastructure on the ground.
While praising President Muhammadu Buhari for providing the enabling environment for government agencies to carry out their duties without hindrance or obstruction, the Minister stated that in the run-up to the presidential elections, threat intelligence revealed a meteoric rise in cyber threats to Nigeria’s cyberspace.
“A total of 12,988,978 attacks were recorded, originating from both within and outside Nigeria. It is worth noting that the Centers successfully blocked these attacks and/or escalated them to the relevant institutions for appropriate action,” Pantami said, according to a statement by his media aide, Uwa Suleiman.
“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.
“The parastatals, under the supervision of the Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy, have played a crucial role in providing the enabling environment for the successful conduct of a credible, free, fair, and transparent election.”
He also commended the cybersecurity centre established under his Ministry, including the National Information Technology (NITDA)’s Computer Emergency Readiness and Response Team (CERRT), the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC)’s Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT), and Galaxy Backbone (GBB)’s Security Operations Centre (SOC) for a job well done.