Census: IT professionals step in, to fortify systems against external attacks

• Explain how INEC ignored loopholes identified prior to 2023 polls

From Fred Itua, Abuja

Ahead of the conduct of the rescheduled National Population and Housing Census, Information Technology (IT) experts, have revealed that they will protect the systems expected to be used by the National Population Commission (NPC) against external attacks and hacks, in order to avoid a repeat of the 2023 general elections.

National President of (Nigeria Computer Society (NCS), Professor Adesina Sodiya, while addressing some newsmen at the weekend, said members of the society were already working with the management of NPC, to fix areas of concern.

“Our relationship with NPC just commenced,” he said. “We’ve identified areas they need to give attention to and they’re five areas. NPC has accepted that we’ll work together so we can review their work so far. INEC was open to external people.

“NPC is open and we’ll be able to learn more. The 2023 national population and housing census will be successful.”

Speaking on how INEC, headed by Professor Mahmood Yakubu, repeatedly ignored concerns raised by the Society before the conduct of the questioned elections, Professor Sodiya noted: “Our society wasn’t part of the last general elections. We were invited but rather was towards the end. They invited us about a week before the elections. We were asked to submit a proposal. We’d been writing to warn them of the need for a constant systems review and we wrote to INEC to always test their platforms. We told them to plan for cyber attacks. We wrote to them about 10 times.

“They told us they were independent. They later saw the reasons and invited us just a week before the elections. But they ignored us for many months. All the things we said may happen, came to pass. If you’re conducting an election on a communications platform, it means you have a lot to do.

“No systems driven by ICT is perfectly safe. INEC said they did trial elections. What did the trial do for them? When they were transmitting results, we discovered that they were transmitting dummy results.”