Managing Director of Galaxy Backbone (GBB), Muhammad Abubakar, says the Federal Government blocked over 200 cyber attacks during the recent presidential and National Assembly elections.
Galaxy Backbone is a Federal Government-owned Information and Communications Technology services provider.
Abubakar disclosed this on Tuesday during the opening session of a two-day ministerial training for GBB’s Board members and management staff 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.
This is the first time a government official has opened up about the attempts to hack into 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.
Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Prof Isa Pantami, who also spoke at the event, applauded GBB’s approach to digital infrastructural development while saving the cost of governance.
Pantami said, “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.”
The theme of the training is, “Positioning the GBB Team for Effective Management and Leadership in the 4th Industrial Revolution”.