The federal government blocked almost 200 cyberattacks during the presidential and national assembly elections, according to Muhammad Abubakar, managing director of Galaxy Backbone (GBB).
Abubakar addressed at the start of a two-day ministerial training for GBB board members and management employees in Abuja on Tuesday.
“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.
This is the first time a government official would be talking about the attempts to hack into the INEC’s server during the last elections.
Political parties have alleged that there were attempts to manipulate the election results by hackers.
Before the election, INEC assured that its system for transmitting election results cannot be penetrated by hackers.
Also speaking at the event, Isa Pantami, minister of communication and digital economy, applauded GBB’s approach to digital infrastructural 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,“ Pantami said.
“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.”
The training has the theme “Positioning the GBB Team for Effective Management and Leadership in the 4th Industrial Revolution”.
The federal government owns Galaxy Backbone, a provider providing information and communications technology services.