Cyber Security Agency Warns of Rising Cyber Attacks on Nigeria’s Critical Infrastructure

The Nigeria Computer Emergency Response Team (ngCERT) has issued a fresh nationwide cyber alert, warning that a sustained wave of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks was increasingly threatening Nigeria’s critical digital infrastructure, with both public and private sector organisations under heightened risk.

In an advisory circulated to operators across strategic sectors and published yesterday by Nairametrics, the national cyber incident response agency said threat actors were deploying more sophisticated and coordinated methods to cripple online services, disrupt operations, and undermine confidence in digital systems.

DDoS attacks involve overwhelming a server, network, or online platform with massive volumes of malicious internet traffic, effectively shutting out legitimate users and rendering services inaccessible.

According to ngCERT, the latest attacks were becoming more complex, more aggressive, and harder to mitigate, with cybercriminals combining several techniques in what it described as multi-vector operations.

The agency said attackers were increasingly blending volumetric floods that saturated bandwidth, protocol-based attacks targeting network infrastructure, and application-layer assaults that imitate legitimate user traffic in order to evade detection and overwhelm defences.

It further disclosed that hackers were exploiting long-known vulnerabilities in widely used software and systems—including Log4Shell and flaws affecting Citrix, Drupal, and DNS infrastructure—to compromise servers, endpoints, and internet-connected devices, which are then recruited into botnets for coordinated assaults.

The advisory noted that threat actors were also leveraging reflection and amplification methods using services such as DNS, NTP, and Memcached to multiply the scale of malicious traffic directed at targets.

It warned that the implications of successful attacks could extend far beyond temporary outages, stressing that prolonged disruption of digital services could inflict significant financial losses, weaken operational resilience, and expose Nigeria’s critical infrastructure to broader systemic risks.

The agency added that repeated service failures could erode public trust in digital platforms, damage institutional reputations, and trigger regulatory consequences for organisations found wanting in cybersecurity preparedness.

It also cautioned that DDoS attacks were being used as smokescreens for more dangerous intrusions, including ransomware deployment and unauthorised data extraction.

To contain the threat, ngCERT urged organisations to activate internal cyber incident response mechanisms and work closely with internet service providers to filter malicious traffic before it reaches core systems.

Among other recommendations, the agency advised institutions to deploy dedicated DDoS mitigation tools, including traffic scrubbing, rate-limiting, and advanced filtering systems, and to patch vulnerable software and harden exposed infrastructure.

Organizations were further encouraged to strengthen resilience through redundancy architecture, load balancing, auto-scaling capabilities, web application firewalls, intrusion prevention systems, and continuous network monitoring.

The latest warning comes amid growing concerns over the vulnerability of Nigeria’s digital ecosystem. Only weeks ago, the Nigeria Data Protection Commission (NDPC) warned of coordinated cyber operations targeting the country’s financial system and other strategic digital assets, saying its technical assessment had uncovered hostile activity by “shadowy threat actors” against critical national systems.

Industry watchers say the twin warnings from ngCERT and NDPC underscore mounting pressure on Nigerian institutions to significantly upgrade cyber defences as the country’s digital economy expands and dependence on online infrastructure deepens.

With Nigeria’s financial services, telecoms, government services, and enterprise operations becoming increasingly digitized, analysts had warned that cyber resilience was no longer a technical issue alone, but a national economic and security imperative.