From Victor Osula, Abuja
The National Information Technology Development Agency, NiTDA has alerted Nigerians to the threat of cyber -attack by a religiously and politically motivated global hacktivist group named Alliance Sudan.
The group said to have been operating in some European countries perceived to be anti- Islamic has widened its base and network through units linked through social media to target government, hospitals, universities, airports, Internet facilities and public entertainment centers.
Alerting Nigerians to their presence in the country, NiTDA Head of Corporate Affairs and External Relations, Mrs Hadiza Umar, on Wednesday said that the agency’s Computer Emergency Readiness and Response Team has detected activities of the group targeting the country’s vital digital infrastructure by “using various attack types, particularly distributed Denial-Of Service, DDOS, attack,”
She urged private and public institutions to take proactive measures immediately to checkmate the“ looming danger that resides much closer to us than we may have previously acknowledged.”
Failure to act now, she said would, affect critical information and infrastructure as well as disruptions of critical services, economic losses, public trust and reputation loss.
As a safeguard, she advises all Ministries, Departments and Agencies including other providers of critical services in the country to ensure the implementation of measures to prevent against DDOS attacks, such as deploying DDOS monitoring systems to watch out for signs of DDOS.”
The measures should include “minimizing the attack surface area thereby limiting the options for attackers and allowing you to build protections in a single place; implementing or subscribing to DDOS protection features, applications and services to fortify your cyber defenses against disruptive DDOS attacks; ensuring that hosting providers offer abundant Internet connectivity enabling systems to manage significant volumes of traffic effectively and configuring network hardware such as firewall or router to drop incoming ICMP packages of block DNS responses from outside the networks,” she added.
