Dipo Olowookere
By Dipo Olowookere
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has denied social media reports that its website has been hacked by some unknown persons.
Some hackers under the name Anonymous have been targeting websites and social media accounts of agencies of the Nigerian government.
They succeeded in breaking into the Twitter account of the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), posting tweets in support of the #EndSARS movement using the agency’s handle.
They promised to hack platforms operated by government agencies and later, there were reports that the website of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and the CBN had been compromised.
But the apex bank, in a statement issued on Friday night by its spokesman, emphasised that its website was intact and not taken over by the hackers as claimed.
In the statement signed by the acting Director in charge of Corporate Communications Department, Mr Osita Nwanisobi, the central bank noted that the website is adequately protected, urging members of the public to desist from spread untrue information.
“Contrary to claims in the social media alleging that the website of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) www.cbn.gov.ng has been breached by malicious persons, we wish to state categorically that our website is secure.
“We wish to assure the Nigerian public and indeed all our other stakeholders that the CBN website is adequately protected and that there is no cause for alarm.
“We also wish to advise members of the online community to desist from peddling false news aimed at undermining the integrity of the Central Bank of Nigeria, which is our collective asset,” the statement issued by the spokesman said.
Checks done by Business Post indicated that the CBN website came under a DDoS attack and this prompted the administrators to activate a Cloudflare protection.
According to Cloudflare, a DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic.
