The Federal Government reported that nearly four million cyber‑attacks were recorded in the period leading up to and during the recent governorship elections. A total of 3.83 million attacks—originating from both domestic and foreign sources—were logged between Friday 17 March 2023 and Monday 20 March 2023. Minister of Communications and Digital Economy Isa Pantami disclosed these figures in a statement signed by his Senior Technical Assistant for Research and Development, Dr Femi Adeluyi. The attacks comprised Distributed Denial‑of‑Service (DDoS) events, email and Internet‑protocol spoofing, SSH login attempts, brute‑force injections, path‑traversal exploits, detection‑evasion techniques and forced browsing. On 17 March the government recorded 1,046,896 attacks; on 18 March the number rose to 1,481,847; on 19 March it fell to 327,718; and on 20 March it climbed again to 977,783.
On 14 March, Pantami inaugurated an advisory committee tasked with protecting Nigeria’s cyberspace and ICT infrastructure during the election. The committee was chaired by the Board Chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), with the CEOs of the NCC, National Information Technology, and Galaxy Backbone serving as members.
After the presidential elections, Pantami announced that the 2023 presidential and National Assembly elections had recorded 12.99 million cyber‑attacks between 24 February and 28 February, with 6.99 million occurring on election day, 25 February. He noted that the governorship and state‑house‑of‑assembly elections attracted far fewer attacks, describing the difference as “neither surprising nor unexpected” because Nigeria, as Africa’s largest democracy, draws greater attention—including from cyber‑threat actors—during presidential and National Assembly contests.
The government’s claim of almost 13 million attacks during the presidential and National Assembly elections was challenged by two cybersecurity experts. Professor Adesina Sodiya, President of the Nigeria Computer Society, called the figure “impossible,” arguing that coordinated attacks would not generate such a volume of repeated signals. He explained that “localisation of attacks” groups multiple signals from the same source into a single incident, suggesting that a single attack may have been counted many times and that further investigation is needed.
Chief Technology Officer of NJALO.NG, Chukw emeka Orjiani, also disputed the numbers, labeling them “propaganda” and asserting that the reported volume could not be accurate. He noted that high request volumes can strain servers, giving the appearance of an attack without constituting one.
Finally, Professor Muhammad Abubakar, Managing Director of Galaxy Backbone and member of the presidential cyber‑attack prevention committee, said the Federal Government blocked over 200 attacks on election day alone. He added that the following day the number of attempted attacks rose dramatically to about 1.2 million, all of which were blocked by his company’s infrastructure.
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