The government reported that a total of 3.83 million cyberattacks had been recorded, with some originating from within the country and others from without.
Minister of Communications and Digital Economy Dr Isa Pantami Maintained this in a statement signed by his Senior Technical Assistant (Research and Development), Dr Femi Adeluyi.
The minister explained that the attacks, which were recorded from Friday 17th March 2023 to Monday 20th March 2023, included Distributed Denial of Service, email and Internet protocol spoofing attacks, SSH login attempts, brute force injection attempts, path traversal, detection evasion, and forceful browsing.
The minister revealed that on Friday 17th March, 2023, a total of 1,046,896 attacks were recorded; Saturday 18th March 2023 recorded 1,481,847 attacks; while the total attacks recorded on Sunday 19th March 2023 were put at 327,718; on Monday 20th March 2023, the number of attacks was put at 977,783.
On March 14, Pantami inaugurated a committee to advise the Federal Government on how the country’s cyber and information technology infrastructure could be protected during elections.
The Nigerian Communications Commission Chairman chaired the committee, which also included the heads of NCC, National Information Technology and Galaxy Backbone.
Pantami disclosed that the 2023 presidential and National Assembly elections had attracted 12.99 million cyberattacks between 24th February and 28th February, with 6.99 million during the presidential election day alone .
Commenting on why governorship and state house of assembly elections attracted fewer cyberattacks, the statement said, “It is interesting to note that the activities of cyber threat actors on the Nigerian cyberspace during the Gubernatorial and State Assembly elections are much lower than those during the Presidential and National Assembly elections.
“This is neither surprising nor unexpected as, Nigeria being Africa’s largest democracy, the Presidential and National Assembly elections are bound to attract much attention of everyone, including cyber threat actors, than during the governorship and state assembly elections."
