‘We blocked over 200 cyberattacks during presidential election’

The Managing Director of Galaxy Backbone Muhammad Abubakar, has said the Federal Government blocked over 200 cyberattacks during the presidential and national assembly elections.

Galaxy Backbone is an information and communications technology services provider, owned by the federal government.

Abubakar spoke on Tuesday at the opening session of a two-day ministerial training for GBB’s board members and management staff in Abuja.

He said, “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.”

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, Minister of Communication and Digital Economy, Isa Pantami, 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.

“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,” Pantami said.

The training has the theme, “Positioning the GBB Team for Effective Management and Leadership in the 4th Industrial Revolution”.