On Saturday, February 25, 2023, during the presidential and national assembly elections, the Federal Government stopped nearly 200 cyberattacks.
Muhammad Abubakar, the Managing Director of Galaxy Backbone, a Federal Government-owned supplier of information and communications technology services, revealed this.
Abubakar remarked at a gathering on Tuesday in Abuja: “On the election day alone, we were able to prevent more than 200 attacks, and the next day, the attacks geometrically escalated to around 1.2 million and all were blocked from our enterprises.”
He said a business continuity and cyberspace protection committee had been formed to guard and regulate digital activities while optimizing the GBB’s technical services.
INEC has, on several occasions, reiterated its commitment to protecting its high-tech equipment from possible cyber-attacks when electronic voting takes effect.
“Cyber-attacks and cybercrimes are global challenges and are not limited to or peculiar to Nigeria.” The commission has been piloting electronic collation and transmission of results.
“The essence of the pilot is to understand the challenges of the system, plug loopholes, perfect the system, and deploy it for bigger elections,” it said before the election.
“It is the responsibility of the commission to constantly and continuously protect its systems through backups and migrations to more robust platforms.
“The commission will not be bogged down by speculative assumptions about possible cyber-attacks on an aspect of electronic voting systems that has not taken off.
We will pilot the system, learn from its challenges, and plug loopholes that might be exploited by desperate people.”
