>
Akinwande Soji-Ojo
The Federal Government has disclosed that a total of 12,988,978 attacks were recorded during the period of presidential and national assembly elections in the country.
Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Prof Isa Ali Pantami, who made the disclosure in a statement on Tuesday, said the attacks, which originated from both within and outside Nigeria, were made on public websites and portals and averaged around 1,550,000 daily.
Pantami, however, said the attacks skyrocketed to 6,997,277 on February 25, the 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 the work on February 28.
“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 minister said.
He added that the 2023 general elections revealed an astronomical increase in cyber threats to Nigerian cyberspace.