Ex-INEC Commissioner Reveals How Cyberattacks Hit Electoral Platforms During 2023 Poll

By Al-Amin Ciroma 

A former National Commissioner of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Festus Okoye, has disclosed that the commission’s digital platforms came under several cyberattacks during the 2023 general election, amid the controversy surrounding the delayed upload of presidential results on the IReV portal.

Okoye made the disclosure while speaking on the Deep Insights podcast hosted by Austin Agbonsuremi.

The National Lens reports that the former INEC Commissioner for Voter Education said the commission encountered a technological failure while attempting to upload polling-unit results from the presidential election to the IReV platform.

According to him, INEC initially expected the problem to be resolved within minutes, but the disruption persisted for considerably longer.

Okoye described the situation as a major disappointment after the extensive preparations that had preceded the election.

He explained that officials eventually drafted a statement to inform Nigerians about the problem, but disagreement over the technical terminology used to describe the failure led to the now-famous description of the incident as a “glitch.”

More significantly, Okoye revealed that INEC’s platforms were subjected to cyberattacks during the election period.

“I know that there were all sorts of cyberattacks on our platforms during that particular period,” he said.

He, however, stopped short of attributing the IReV failure directly to the cyberattacks, stressing that he could not establish whether they contributed to the disruption.

“Whether those cyberattacks influenced what happened at the end of the day, I’m not in a position to say,” he added. 

INEC had previously provided a separate technical explanation for the IReV failure, saying presidential result uploads were generating internal server errors because of a configuration problem in the system’s mapping of election results.

Our correspondent gathered that the commission said it subsequently deployed software “hotfixes”, with the first presidential result sheet successfully uploaded at 8:55 p.m. on February 25, 2023. It also said heavy traffic and offline BVAS devices contributed to further delays in uploading queued results. 

Okoye’s latest disclosure is likely to renew debate over the technological preparedness and cybersecurity of Nigeria’s electoral infrastructure ahead of the 2027 general elections, particularly as INEC continues to rely heavily on digital systems for result management and transparency.

The former commissioner also disclosed that INEC’s deputy director responsible for ICT later appeared before the election petition tribunal to explain the circumstances surrounding the technical difficulties.

The disclosure does not, however, establish that cyberattacks caused the 2023 presidential result-upload failure. Okoye himself said he could not determine whether the attacks influenced the incident.