Nigeria’s independent national electoral commission (INEC) just had to fight a two-front battle over the weekend; running an election and containing a breach of its official website.
INEC regained control of its website less than an hour after the hackers defaced it. But there are questions about who these hackers were.
The group that defaced INEC’s website identified itself as the Nigerian Cyber Army (NCA) in the run-on gripe justifying the hack on INEC’s hacked website, but the team members – ten of them listed on the group’s Facebook page, were comfortably ensconced behind their cryptic pseudonyms …until a thread on Nairaland released social media details of some of the hackers.
R3D-spear, Bitire215, b4tchFw34k, DR41DeY, Ghost-H4x0r, CyberGuru4u, Mr Ghost, MrPortal, Angel Dot ID and Zombie 1337 were faceless internet people until a user on Nigeria’s popular user generated content website, Nairaland, posted an “investigation” from a group calling itself Nigerian Cyberspace Protectors (NCP) that revealed Facebook profiles and images for some of the hackers.
NCP says it combed through Facebook timeline and drew inferences from interactions among the alleged hackers.
In all, NCP scoped out eight profiles – Red Bullet, Victor Kenneth, Michael Stonebridge, Mbosinwa Awunor, Nasiru Ahmad, Haxor Noob Striker, M Craj Gidiboss and Jason Skok -, with links to the hacker group and released four images. It’s impossible to say which codename is for which profile, but when we attempted to verify NCP claims, we found that four of the profiles, including Haxor Noob Striker, M Craj Gidiboss, Jason Skok and Victor Kenneth openly associate themselves with the hacker group.
NCP’s investigation looks plausible, especially with the guys who have obvious links the hacker group, but whether this can be taken seriously is another question altogether. If only for how it was presented on the website. It is also worthy of note that NCP, has no internet breadcrumb (at least from what have so far seen), this makes it even harder to give any heft to the group.
Hopefully, Nigeria’s IT regulator, National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) will check this out and give an official statement.
Image via: capitalotc
