The Federal Government has alerted Nigerians, including individuals and organisations, to escalating cases of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, urging deeper security consciousness. According to the Nigeria Data Protection Commission (NDPC), the country’s fast-growing digital economy is facing a mounting cybersecurity crisis, with over 4,000 cyber-attacks recorded weekly—prompting urgent calls for stronger data protection, local data storage and stricter regulatory compliance.
Through the Nigeria Computer Emergency Response Team (ngCERT), the government warned of a sustained and intensifying wave of DDoS attacks disrupting digital infrastructure. In the first four months, hackers unleashed data breach attacks on banks, financial institutions and government establishments, stealing sensitive information while demanding huge ransoms.
In the advisory, ngCERT stated that threat actors are increasingly deploying sophisticated techniques, including botnets, amplification methods and exploitation of known vulnerabilities, to overwhelm systems and render essential services inaccessible. The agency noted that both government and private sector platforms are at risk as attackers refine their methods.
A DDoS attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt a server, service or network by overwhelming it with a flood of Internet traffic, making it unavailable to legitimate users. The agency highlighted that the evolving nature of DDoS attacks has made them more complex and harder to mitigate.
The ngCERT explained that attackers frequently exploit vulnerabilities such as CVE-2018-10561, CVE-2021-44228, CVE-2019-19781, CVE-2018-7600 and CVE-2020-25705 to compromise systems and expand botnet networks. These compromised systems, which may include servers, endpoints and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, are then used to launch coordinated attacks.
The National Commissioner of NDPC, Dr Vincent Olatunji, disclosed at the IoT West Africa 2026 conference in Lagos that the scale of attacks highlights critical vulnerabilities that must be addressed to sustain digital growth. According to him, the challenge is not just the frequency of attacks, but the country’s level of preparedness to detect, prevent and respond effectively.
“In Nigeria, we experience over 4,000 attacks per week. It may interest you to know that even at the NDPC, within one week, we record over 1,500 attempts on our networks. This shows the level of threats we are witnessing in the country,” he said.
Olatunji noted that while Nigeria’s digital economy is expanding rapidly, driven by fintech, e-commerce, cloud services and connected devices, this growth has also widened the attack surface for cybercriminals. Globally, the digital economy contributes over $20 trillion, about 20 per cent of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP), while Nigeria’s digital sector contributes over $18.3 billion, underscoring its strategic importance.
