We blocked 3.8 million cyberattacks in gubernatorial elections – FG
The federal government has announced that a total of 3,834,244 cyberattacks were launched against Nigeria in the last gubernatorial and state house of assembly elections.
According to Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Prof. Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami, the attacks came from both inside and outside Nigeria.
Pantami said 1.05 million attacks were recorded per day against the governorate and state houses of assembly, while 1.5 million attacks were recorded on election day.
327,718 attacks were recorded on Sunday March 19 while 977,783 attacks were launched on the country’s IT infrastructure on Monday March 20.
During the election period, a series of hacking attempts have been recorded and include distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, email and internet protocol (IPS) spoofing, SSH login attempts, injection attempts brute force, path traversal, detection evasion and force navigation.
The signed statement released by Pantami Technical Assistant Dr. Femi Adeluyi reads as follows;
“Interestingly, the activities of cyber threat actors on Nigerian cyberspace in the gubernatorial and state assembly elections are much lower than those in the presidential and national assembly elections. is neither surprising nor unexpected because, Nigeria being the largest democracy in Africa, the Presidential and National Assembly elections will certainly attract more attention from all, including cyber threat actors, than during the elections. in the office of Governor and in the State Assembly. Furthermore, the Honorable Minister is convinced that the implementation of certain recommendations as well as the measures taken to strengthen our cyber defense mechanisms could have contributed to this”
The minister, who revealed that the attacks were neutralized by agencies under his ministry, added that the ministry had previously developed and implemented plans to strengthen the resilience of critical digital infrastructure against cyber threats in the country.
Pantami also said the country has designed procedures and used superior technologies to prevent, detect and respond to cyberattacks, as well as developed the ability to quickly recover from any damage caused when attacks occur.
