12.9m cyber attacks recorded during last elections – FG

The Federal Government has said that a total of 12,988,978 attacks were recorded during the February 25 Presidential and National Assembly elections period in Nigeria.

Originated from both within and outside Nigeria, the attacks were made on public websites and portals and averaged around 1,550,000 daily, the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Prof Isa Ali Pantami said in a statement on Tuesday.

However, Pantami said the attacks skyrocketed to 6,997,277 on presidential election day.

“It is worth noting that our (cybersecurity) centers successfully blocked these attacks and/or escalated them to the relevant institutions for appropriate action,” the minister said.

He said a committee set up by his ministry to curtail the activities of cyber criminals during the elections started work on February 24, 2023 and ended work on February 28.

He said: “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.”

Pantami said in the runup to the 2023 general elections, threat intelligence revealed an astronomical increase in cyber threats to Nigerian cyberspace.