During the recently concluded presidential and national assembly elections, 12.9 million cyberattacks were recorded from both within and outside the country, according to the minister of Communications and Digital Economy.
The Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Isa Pantami announced this on Tuesday, claiming that over 6.9 million attacks were recorded on election day alone.
According to Pantami, the attacks were successfully blocked due to sophisticated infrastructure on the ground by various government agencies charged with protecting the nation’s cyberspace.
While praising President Muhammadu Buhari for creating an enabling environment for government agencies to carry out their responsibilities without interference, the Minister stated that in the run-up to the presidential elections, threat intelligence revealed an astronomical increase in cyber threats to Nigeria’s cyberspace.
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“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 praised the cybersecurity center established under his ministry, including the National Information Technology and Development Agency’s Computer Emergency Readiness and Response Team (CERRT), the Nigerian Communications Commission’s Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT), and Galaxy Backbone’s Security Operations Centre (SOC), for a job well done.
