The Nigerian Defence Headquarters on Friday regained control of its website hours after unidentified hackers took control of the platform, http://defenceinfo.mil.ng and defaced it.
Tweets were posted on a twitter handle, @imamsadiq123, claiming responsibility for the cyber attack. The DHQ provided no information on the identity of the hackers.
Saturday PUNCH noticed that tweets on the Twitter handle bearing the logo ‘Our Prophet Our Honour’ date back to December 25, 2014.
The tweets labelled President Goodluck Jonathan ‘an infidel’ while also justifying an attack on presidential guards during a PDP campaign in Bauchi State on Thursday.
The Director of Defence Information, Maj.-Gen. Chris Olukolade, said in a tweet hours after the attack that the infiltration had been blocked.
He initially said in a tweet, “Yes. Our website has been defaced. There’s an ISIS style attempt to hack into Government Platforms. Our provider, @Galaxybackbone is on it.”
Olukolade later said the hackers defaced the front end of the website but could not penetrate the database of the site. He said preliminary investigation revealed that the attack was launched from the end of the site host.
Olukolade said @imamsadiq123 had been put off for the site activities.
“Normal activities on the channel have resumed. Apparently, the blogsite was targeted because of its role as a major channel for disseminating information on military and security activities in the nation’s counter-terrorism campaign,” he said.
