Nigeria’s National Information Development Agency (NITDA) has announced that it hasn’t received any report of the global cyber attack at any Nigerian establishment.
It would be recalled that a cyberattack using tools supposedly stolen from the US National Security Agency (NSA) has struck organisations around the world. Avast said it had seen 75,000 cases of the ransomware – known as WannaCry and variants of that name – around the world.
There are reports of infections in 99 countries, including Russia and China. Among the worst hit was the National Health Service (NHS) in England and Scotland.
NITDA’s DG, Dr Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami however said though attack was not reported anywhere in the country the agency had put some measures in place to prevent it from spreading to Nigeria.
According to him, the ransomware attack was exploiting vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Windows operating System especially those not currently supported such as Windows XP, Windows 8, Windows Server 2003.
“Microsoft released a patch for the vulnerability in March and machines that were updated with the patch would have been automatically protected”, Dr Pantami said.
Furthermore, the NITDA DG said should any system be infected by the ransomware, it should be isolated from other network to prevent the threat from further spreading.
