Description
The website of the Foundation for Investigative Journalism (FIJ) has suffered multiple coordinated cyberattacks traceable to the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) headquarters in Abuja.
The Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks, which briefly knocked FIJ’s website offline, started on Thursday morning.
DDOS attacks happen when attackers flood a website with fake traffic, usually from many hacked computers (a botnet) to overwhelm the server. As a result, the website would be unable to handle real visitors and ultimately shut down after a continuous barrage.
The attacks are coming after FIJ published a series of reports exposing registered companies and private individuals illegally trading Nigerians’ NIN data for cheap on the data black market.
“When I checked, it wasn’t loading either, so I contacted the service provider. In fact, they were the ones who first discovered the issue,” said the head of FIJ’s web team.
According to his technical analysis of the situation, the service provided identified an IP address that had overwhelmed FIJ’s website with over 50,000 requests within an hour. A deeper analysis eventually revealed the scale of the attack.
“In the last 72 hours there were about 2 million requests. Each hit is a real request because once you visit the site, 15–20 scripts are loaded, each as a separate request.”
Most of the requests came from undefined devices and browsers, a sign of a coordinated cyberattack.
“The same IP address was behind it, and when I checked the IP, both on Cloudflare and on What’s My IP Address, it showed NIMC,” he added.
Details
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PerpetratorNIMC HQ in Abuja.
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Source
