Tayo Busayo, Abuja

 

DAILY COURIER – Amid widespread failures and challenges encountered by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), to transmit the presidential election results at polling units through the IReV on election day, the Nigeria Information Technology and Shared Services provider, Galaxy Backbone Limited, says it countered over 1.2 million attempted cyber attacks during the February 25 Presidential and National Assembly elections.

 

Managing Director of the Centre, Muhammad Abubakar, made the disclosure at the opening session of a two-day ministerial training for GBB’s board members and management staffers on Tuesday in Abuja.

 

The training was tagged: “Positioning the GBB Team for Effective Management and Leadership in the 4th Industrial Revolution.

 

“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.

 

“Because of the elections, we came up with a business community and Cyberspace protection that is supposed to run for one month and at least one week after the Gubernatorial elections.

 

“On election day alone, cyber-attacks cost $4b and how did we get to that, We have a reference, a single cyber attack cost $18,000 as of December 2023″, he said.

 

While Abubakar did not disclose if the IReV infrastructure’s whole or partial downtime was caused by the cyberattacks or the numerous efforts it repelled, he pointed out that the agency established a business community and Cyberspace protection committee to ensure Nigeria’s cyberspace is secure for the 2023 general election while acknowledging its accomplishments.

 

In his remarks, Minister of Communication and Digital Economy, Isa Pantammi, said the training was aimed at evaluating and recalibrating the Galaxy backbone Limited in regards to management and leadership for optimal outputs.

 

Pantami, who served as the training facilitator, applauded GBB’s approach to digital infrastructure development while saving the cost of governance.

 

“In this training, I will be very much 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-judgement, self-assessment.

 

“We need to think out of the box to discover new areas for government revenue generation.

 

“We need to be proactive in our thinking. Let us not maintain the same process every day when it comes to revenue generation”, he said.