Amid ongoing protests across major cities in Nigeria following the campaign to check the excesses of Police officers, especially the now notorious Special Anti-Robbery Squad ( SARS) of the Nigeria Police Force, palpable fear has engulfed well-meaning Nigerians as incidents of hacking of websites of government agencies and sundry business concerns become rife.
Although the President Muhamadu Buhari- led government has disbanded the infamous SARS and plans are underway to replace the interventionist crime fighting Police arm with a new outfit in the mould of the American SWAT, Nigerian youth have taken the #EndSARS protests to new heights as commercial and economic activities have been paralyzed across the country.
Youth sleep and eat on major streets and cities.
With no end to the protests yet in sight,a hacker going by the alias “Anonymous” last week, claimed it had hacked the Twitter handle of the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC).
The NBC however, pooh-poohed the allegation and described it as mere rumours but in a surprise twist, *”Anonymous”* has
made a couple of pro-EndSARS tweets using the Twitter handle of the NBC.
The faceless group has in the interim, said it has the capacity to hack into the websites of the Nigerian government and lay its activities bare to all Nigerians if they get the nod and prompting of the masses.
First Bank Nigeria (FBN) was also not spared the embarrassment.
This is coming on the heels of the alleged hacking into the facilities of South African communications giants DSTV with subscribers whose subscriptions had expired, enjoying free bouquets.
With their tails behind their backs, DSTV, like the NBC , also debunked the hacking claiming the multi- national outfit was doing some maintenance.
There are indications that Airtel might have been compromised too by the group.
Any Airtel subscriber who dials *123#,gets credited with an instant one thousand Naira airtime.
Observers say,the telecommunications company is not on promo and the outfit is yet to make any official statement on the windfall as at the time of writing this story thereby laying credence to a possible compromise of its operating systems.
With the stakes getting messier,some analysts say they suspect that Nigerian- born Hushpuppi who is cooling his heels in an American prison for cyber related crime could be the mastermind and brain behind the hacks.
Although there was no clear nexus between the unfolding scenerio, plundits argue that Hushpuppi was the cyber expert who was contracted by a political party to hack the back end of the servers of the Independent National Electoral Commission,(INEC) during the 2019 Presidential elections.
If these permutations are anything to go by, a source which craved annonimity said Nigeria and indeed Nigerians were in for a night of long knives.
“No one knows what to expect the next minute. If this could happen without let, we are then endengeared because one could wake up and discover that our accounts have been cleaned out in our respective banks.”
“Our military capabilities, intelligence and other critical sectors of state craft could also be compromised if this is true.
So,it is best that the authorities step up their game to check these trends that some people claim are rumours.
But behind every rumour,there is an element of truth,” the source concluded.
