According to Muhammad Abubakar, managing director of Galaxy Backbone (GBB), the federal government successfully blocked over 200 cyberattacks during the presidential and national assembly elections. GBB is a technology service provider owned by the government of Nigeria.
Abubakar made this statement during the opening session of a two-day ministerial training for GBB's board members and management staff in Abuja on Tuesday.
Abubakar added that on the election day itself, GBB prevented more than 200 attacks, and the next day, the number of attacks increased exponentially to about 1.2 million, all of which were thwarted. However, Abubakar did not indicate whether the attacks were aimed at the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC)'s server. Several political parties had accused hackers of trying to manipulate the election results.
Before the election, INEC had assured the public that its system for transmitting election results could not be hacked. During the training session, Isa Pantami, the Minister of Communication and Digital Economy, praised GBB's approach to digital infrastructure development while reducing the cost of governance.
Pantami said, "In this training, I will be very sincere with you to point out some areas where we need significant improvement. Training is key when it comes to improving our performance, and at the same time, training is key when it comes to our self-evaluation, self-judgment, self-assessment.
We need to think outside the box to discover new areas for government revenue generation. We need to be proactive in our thinking and not stick to the same processes every day when it comes to revenue generation."
The training's theme was "Positioning the GBB Team for Effective Management and Leadership in the 4th Industrial Revolution."
However, research by The Standard Gazette indicates that there are about 2000 cyberattacks in one year all over the world and the claims if 1.2 million is unfortunately false.
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