Nigeria Admits Presidential Election was Hacked
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Government minister says there were over 12 million cyber attacks on INEC servers on Election Day which delayed transmission of results allowing for manipulation
The Nigerian Minister of Communications and Digital Economy Professor Isa Ali Ibrahim confirmed on Tuesday that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) servers were attacked more than 12 million times during the presidential and national assembly elections.
“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, this skyrocketed to 6,997,277 on Presidential Election Day.” The statement issued in Abuja the federal capital read.
The minister popularly known as Pantami said parastatals were created to secure the national cyberspace namely, the National Information Technology (NITDA)’s Computer Emergency Readiness and Response Team (CERRT), the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC)’s Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT), and Galaxy Backbone (GBB)’s Security Operations Centre (SOC) between 2020 and 2022.
Pantami further stated before the contested presidential election, a committee was formed to ensure that the transmission of electoral data was safe from hackers with the key task of monitoring the telecommunication infrastructure for the successful conduct of a credible, free, fair, and transparent election.
“The Committee’s activity started on 24th February 2023 and ended on 28th February 2023.” He added. During the time the committee was active there were series of recorded hacking attempts , including Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), email and IPS attacks, SSH Login Attempts, Brute force Injection attempts, Path Traversal, Detection Evasion, and Forceful Browsing.
“A total of 12,988,978 attacks were recorded, originating from both within and outside Nigeria. It is worth noting that the Centers successfully blocked these attacks and/or escalated them to the relevant institutions for appropriate action.” Pantami said.
It could be recalled that INEC shut down its servers due to the attack on election day claiming that it had no capacity to conduct a “free fair and credible election” nationwide.
“The Commission is aware of challenges with the INEC Results Viewing Portal (IReV). Unlike in off-season elections where the portal was used, it has been relatively slow and unsteady. The Commission regrets this setback, especially because of the importance of IReV in our results management process.” Festus Okoye the INEC spokesman said in a statement.
Electoral observers say INEC violated the Electoral Act of 2022 when it hurriedly declared Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the ruling All Progressive Congress (APC) the winner without carrying out a thorough investigation of the discrepancies in numbers from both hard copy from polling units and soft copy results on the INEC servers.
The APC has accused the opposition of hacking the election after the opposition rejected the results and went to court.
The opposition Labour Party (LP) lawyers are currently inspecting certified true copies of INEC data in search of evidence that will substantiate their presidential candidate Peter Obi claim that he won the election.
Akowe with reports from Abuja
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