Nigerian Population Commission website hacked!!!

Nigerian Population Commission website hacked!

As if to answer my current muse on the state of cybersecurity in Nigeria, I turned up at the office and what did I discover from a google search for updated Nigerian statistics? The Nigerian Population Commission site at http://www.population.gov.ng (dont go there, by the way) has been taken down by some hackers and filled with links to all what not!

I am currently running some analytics to get a bit of a history on the attack and will update this information very soon. I think as a nation, we need to do something serious about this. A little while ago, rumour had it that one of the newspapers was taken down (won’t quote, I have no facts on this).

As a matter of urgency, the government might want to consider putting a ban on websites that do not meet stringent security requirements. While this can never solve the problem of cyber attacks altogether, it will be a step towards showing that if its not gonna be done right, it should not be done at all.

Think about the effect that routing of emails through Nigerian IPs has had on our national image as glorified 419ers. Like my friend used to say, oh gosh, oh gosh gosh.

I have resorted not to complaining about Nigeria unless a solution is being recommended, but at the same time, I cannot help but notice how alot of MDAs and Parastatals spend millions on website contracts while they really dont even need or have the capacity to utilise their web presence.

No website at all is better than a poorly run and managed (and secured) one. True for private sector establishments, truer for Government.

How much worse can it get?

I am not Carl Sack from Boston Legal Season 4, but once in a while I like to google my name and the name of my friends to see what turns up. Narcissistic you might think, but I strongly believe it is important for a regular internet hound like myself to see what might pop up by way of cross links and references. However, I was not prepared for what I found! A html page on my school website, that had on it the list of all the students in the school, their matriculation / student identification numbers, and the bank and teller numbers of payment of school fees for the current session. HORRIBLE!

I don’t even want to imagine the damage that is possible if a professional hacker gets to work on the school website. Its simply preposterous that a university of such status cannot be more tech conscious. Why does everything have to be so sloppily done? I am not a person to whine, but this level of laxitude and corporate denseness has to stop. I don’t even want to talk about the security features of the school website. Just thinking about it makes me sick!