According to cybersecurity experts, it is unlikely that 12.99 million cyberattacks were registered during the elections as claimed by the Federal Government.
According to them, the administration should provide evidence to support its claims, and experts should review its internal policies. The minister of communications and the digital economy, Isa Pantami, disclosed on Tuesday that there were 12.99 million cyberattacks during the election week.
He claimed that there were 6 point 99 million attacks on the day of the presidential election (February 25). He described the recorded hacking attempts as including path traversal, detection evasion, email and IPS attacks, brute force injection attempts, SSH login attempts, Distributed Denial of Service, and forceful browsing.
Pantami pointed out that the Presidential cybersecurity committee for the election was up to the task and stopped all the attacks.
It is important to note that threat intelligence revealed an exponential rise in cyberthreats to Nigerian cyberspace in the months leading up to the 2023 General Elections, according to a statement from Pantami’s spokesperson, Uwa Sulaiman.
“In general, there were roughly 1.550,000 daily threats to open websites and portals. On the day of the presidential election, this rose dramatically to 6,997,277. ”.
Cybersecurity experts have refuted the government’s claims, arguing that the claim could be the result of propaganda.
According to Professor Adesina Sodiya, president of the Nigeria Computer Society, “I am wondering how they would experience that amount of large cyberattack in a day during the election based on my personal experience.
“In my experience, I don’t believe we could have achieved that. However, we require more details in order to understand their motivation for saying that. “.
He claimed that the chairman of the commission said there had been no attack when the NCS asked INEC if it had recently recorded any attacks. “Now that they’ve claimed that there were cyberattacks, it doesn’t make sense. “.
Sodiya continued, “In my experience as a professor of cybersecurity, they cannot experience that many cyberattacks.
“Cyberattacks can occasionally be planned. They attempt again if they are unsuccessful the first time. “.
