Business

Nigerians react, demand for Patanmi’s sack over NIMC data’s hack

Published

5 years ago

January 11, 2022

Nigerians have continued to express their disappointment, demanding for the immediate sacking of the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Dr. Isa Pantami over the hacking of the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) website by hackers, stealing over three million National Identity Numbers of Nigerians.

The Hacker who is known as Sam in an article shared on infosecwriteups.com, boasted that he got access to “juice” on the Nigerian Government agency’s server and that he could go ahead to do whatever he desired with other sensitive data at his disposal.

Displaying a defaced National Identity card of a Nigerian alongside the article, the hacker said, “I’ve got one more output for s3 bucket, I casually tried to access it without any hope, and damn! The s3 bucket is full of juice.

Reacting, a user on the micro-blogging platform with the handle @isidags said, “I’m shocked Nigerians are shocked. Seems you people don’t know the government and country you’re involved with.”

Another user known as @boluxxxx while commenting said, “Jokes aside, this is enough reason for Buhari to sack Pantami.”

Berating Nigeria’s weak cyber security, another Twitter user, @bespokeKENErd, said, “It was only a matter of time before this happened. Nigeria’s information security is ridiculously lax. So careless with sensitive data.”

@St_Gothica while reacting to the issue said, “This is exactly why I never wanted to do the NIN registration. Delayed it as long as I could.”

Another Twitter user, @The_Jonathanian, said, “Somebody should tell Sheik Pantami that the most sensitive data of Nigerians under his care have been compromised and floating in the wild.”

The hacking of the NIMC server has not only exposed Nigeria’s weak cyber security but also highlighted the danger the country’s residents and investments were currently under.

The latest cyber-attack comes less than two months after the Nigerian Communications Commission in November 2021 issued a warning that an Iranian hacking group was planning to carry out cyber espionage across Africa.

A statement from the agency had further disclosed that the hackers were targeting telecoms, Internet Service Providers, and Ministries of Foreign Affairs in Nigeria and other African countries.

Over 60 million Nigerians had so far been captured on the national identity database, according to the NIMC.