FG Records 6m Cyberattacks On Election Day

Close to 13 million cyberattacks were recorded during the presidential and national assembly elections, the federal government has said.

The elections held on March 25 have been mostly disputed over the refusal of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, to upload the results on its server.

The Prof Mahmood Yakubu-led INEC had blamed the attacks on its servers by hackers for the inability of the commission to load results on the IReV portal.

The portal is now ready for the governorship and House of Assembly elections slated for March 18, the commission said on Monday.

Speaking on Tuesday, the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Isa Pantami said President Muhammadu Buhari has now set up a committee to protect the cyberspace and information communication technology, ICT, infrastructure during the elections.

Pantami who spoke on the committee’s efforts so far said in a statement on Tuesday, that prior to the elections, the daily number of threats against public websites was about 1,550,000.

The minister stated that the threats increased significantly to about six million on election day.

According to him, close to 12 million attacks were successfully blocked from both local and international territories.

The statement said “It is worth noting that in the run-up to the 2023 general elections, threat intelligence revealed an astronomical increase in cyber threats to Nigerian cyberspace,” he said.

“Generally, threats to public websites and portals averaged around 1,550,000 daily. However, this skyrocketed to 6,997,277 on presidential election day.

“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, Ppth traversal, detection evasion, and forceful browsing.

“A total of 12,988,978 attacks were recorded, originating from both within and outside Nigeria. It is worth noting that the centres successfully blocked these attacks and/or escalated them to the relevant institutions for appropriate action.”

One of the reasons cited by those calling for the cancellation of the election is the refusal of the electoral body to upload the election results on its portal as soon as results were announced at the various polling centers three weeks ago.

It’s largely on that basis that the two major opposition parties in the election, the People’s Democratic Party, PDP, and Labour Party, LP are now challenging the elections in the court.