The Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Prof. Isa Pantami has disclosed that 6,997,277 cyber attacks were recorded across various public websites during the Presidential and National Assembly elections.
The minister who spoke in Abuja on Tuesday noted that the attacks originated from both within and outside Nigeria.
It could be recalled that INEC also made a similar claim, stating that hackers attempted to breach its server before, during and after the election. The electoral umpire had been criticised for its failure to upload election results to its server in real-time.
“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.
“Generally, threats to public websites and portals averaged around 1,550,000 daily. However, they skyrocketed to 6,997,277 on election day,” Pantami said.
Pantami also disclosed that a technical committee was set up to curtail the activities of cyber criminals during the elections period.
The minister further listed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), email and IPS attacks, SSH Login Attempts, Brute force Injection attempts, Path Traversal, Detection Evasion, and Forceful Browsing as some of the hacks in attempts witnessed during the period.
