Nigeria suffered over 12.9m cyber attacks during presidential, NASS elections

Isa Ali Pantami, minister of communications and digital economy says Nigeria suffered 12,988,978 attacks from within and outside the country during the recently held presidential and National Assembly elections.

In a statement issued by his spokesperson, Uwa Suleiman, the minister also said there was an astronomical increase in cyber threats to Nigerian cyberspace in the period leading to the election.

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

However, these threats were detected, controlled and escalated to relevant institutions for appropriate action with proactive steps from the minister.

Prior to the elections, Pantami directed all the parastatals to enhance their 24/7 monitoring of the networks and traffic for potential attacks from February 24, 2023, to February 27, 2023.

“Furthermore, on February 24, 2023, the minister inaugurated the ministerial Standing Committee on Advisory Role for the Protection of Nigerian Cyberspace and ICT Infrastructure; the committee, chaired by the Board Chairman of NCC and with the CEOs of NCC, NITDA and GBB as members, was charged with monitoring telecommunication infrastructure for the successful conduct of credible, free, fair, and transparent elections, developing and implementing plans to enhance the resilience of critical digital infrastructure against cyber threats,” Sulaiman said in the statement.

The committee also had to develop a comprehensive risk assessment and analysis of the nation’s current cybersecurity capabilities while identifying gaps to be addressed including the design of procedures to prevent, detect, and respond to cyber-attacks and in addition, provide professional advice to the government on the effective utilization of digital technologies in the conduct of the 2023 General Elections.

According to the statement, the committee’s activity started on 24th February 2023 and ended on 28th February 2023, during which 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 minister commended all stakeholders in the digital economy ecosystem for their support noting that parastatals, under the supervision of the Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy played a crucial role in providing the enabling environment for the successful conduct of a credible, free, fair, and transparent election.