I appeal to President Buhari not to use electronic voting to create internet fraud jobs for Yahoo! boys and hackers through electoral reforms. Electoral reforms must prioritise and secure electronic voting and Nigeria’s cyberspace against imminent threats from cyber attackers. The activities of hackers and cyber criminals are threat to the economy, elections and security of Nigerians and vital infrastructure connected to the Internet. The activities of criminals in our cyberspace are threatening our individual and collective privacy. There is need to take serious action to protect the country’s cyberspace and electronic voting.
Electoral reform must prioritise standard cyber defence mechanisms as no system is 100 per cent secure. Even with state-of-the-art defences we must always consider the possible consequences of a successful attack. Election integrity is paramount, requiring authentication of eligible voters, and assurance in the handling and tallying of votes. Any e-voting system must be trusted even in the face of the ever-increasing range of cyber threats. These include the possibility of system penetration from well-resourced adversaries; the possible presence of spoof voting sites; malware on voting devices or within the central system; and insider threats from those with privileged access to the system.
The system must guard against cyber attacks, malfeasance, technical breakdown or administrative incompetence which could easily wreak havoc with electronic systems and could go largely or wholly undetected. This is a concern made much more urgent by Russia’s cyber-attacks in USA on political party servers and state voter registration databases in 2016 and by the risk of a repeat – or worse.
We must watch against hacking threat by the use of cyber means to cause disruption before, on, or after Election Day. Disruption has been attempted without cyber means-sometimes with elaborate schemes-but cyber capabilities could make disruption easier to pull off and, as a result, more likely to occur. The obvious targets for disruptive efforts are, e-poll books, digital logs used on Election Day to confirm voter identities.
Cybercriminals have done their best to disrupt national elections around the world over the last few years, be it through fake news campaigns or by directly hacking officials’ e-mails and database. Many have got as far as breaching a country’s online voting systems and manipulating a result like what happened in Democratic Republic of Congo last year. .
Sadly, for the past few weeks, the rate at which different views by popular entertainment celebrities and even the so-called ‘intellectuals’, social media influenza (influencers perhaps) have been trying to normalise and appraise Yahoo-Yahoo boys activities and other illegal activities through various social platforms in Nigeria is becoming alarming and ridiculous. This is, however, a reflection of the fact that a considerable part of the Nigerian society celebrates ‘prosperity’, ‘ill-gotten wealth’ and glorify fraud without questioning where the ‘money’ comes from.
The electoral reform should address why less than 30 million voters came out to vote out of over 80 million registered voters. In spite of the massive mobilisation, what is it that makes people register, collect their PVCs and fail to come out and vote?
- By Inwalomhe Donald Abuja inwalomhe.donald@yahoo.com
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