The Managing Director of Galaxy Backbone, Prof. Muhammad Abubakar, has disclosed that the Federal Government blocked over 200 cyberattacks during the presidential and National Assembly elections held on February 25.
Abubakar made the disclosure at the opening session of a two-day ministerial training for board members and management staff on Tuesday in Abuja.
“On the election day alone, we were able to block more than 200 attacks and the next day, the attacks geometrically increased to about 1.2 million and all were blocked from our own businesses,” he said.
He said a business continuity and cyberspace protection committee had been formed to guard and regulate digital activities while optimising the GBB’s technical services.
Galaxy Backbone is the federal government’s information technology and shared services provider.
Abubakar said that the training was aimed at reviewing the agency’s performance while initiating alternative means of revenue generation.
On February 23, the ministry inaugurated the cyberspace and information and communication technology infrastructure protection committee ahead of the 2023 general elections.
IReV, which the electoral office designed to receive election result sheets directly from polling units, suffered an outage shortly after polls closed on Saturday afternoon.
Polling agents could not upload results from the presidential election, while only a few attempts to upload federal parliamentary election results were successful.
Last Friday, chief mobiliser for the APC in the presidential election, Ekene Enefe, accused the Labour Party and Peoples Democratic Party of spamming the server of the INEC with several hack attacks.
