To ensure stronger security protection for data transmission before the February 25 general elections, the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC has been advised to conduct a stress test on Data-in-Motion or in Transit on Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS, before elections. The charge was given by Mr. Tim Akano, a technology expert and CEO of New Horizons Nigeria while speaking on the topic: “Understanding privacy and online risk in the digital world today,” at the 2023 World Data Privacy Day, organized by the Data and Knowledge Privacy Protection Initiative. Akano said the February 25th, 2023 general election will be the first time in the history of the country that live data will be used to determine which of the candidates will become the next president of Nigeria. According to him. “The inferno that can burn us as a country is the use of live data that is vulnerable to attack. It is in the best interest of INEC in particular and Nigeria, in general, to pay more than casual attention to what we call the man in the middle attack, which hackers can exploit to intercept, modify, or retransmit election data while in motion or in transit. “There is nothing more important in Nigeria today than the success of the February election, and we are a country of about 222 million, and nothing must go wrong because the entire West African coast, from Benin Republic to Togo to Ghana, does not have the infrastructure to sustain us.” Speaking on instances where conflicting results in other African countries had led to untold bloodbaths, Akano revealed that between 2007 and 2008, Kenya witnessed an untold bloodbath arising from conflicting election results. He disclosed that in 2010 and 2011, Ivory Coast also witnessed disastrous outcomes when conflicting election results were announced in the country.
Citing instances where such case occurred in the American continent, he said in 2016, Russia was alleged to have influenced the American presidential elections through technology, and coming home, he spoke on the recent Osun Governorship Tribunal judgment. He said: “Three types of BVAS results on the same election were alleged to have been tendered and this should not be because Maths is exact, absolute. “According to the 2022 Securonix Threat, the report reveals that insiders were involved in 57 percent of data breaches and there are new technological solutions to this if INEC cares to prevent that.” Commending INEC for the endto-end encryption they have done for the technology, he called on INEC Chairman on the need to urgently talk to some Nigerian Cyber security practitioners, as well as appoint some advocates who will conduct a stress test on BVAS DIM (Data- in- Motion) before the wholesale adoption on February 25. He said it is common practice for big companies such as Microsoft and Oracle to carry out test on new develop software by calling on strong hackers to test it and see if they can hack into the software easily. He added that if they can, the electoral body SHOULD go back to their lab to ensure they work on it. Akano advised INEC to carry out an upgrade after the election, to ensure that the issue of over voting does not arise from BVAS by building in a technology that uses artificial intelligence, AI, which will alert one when over voting arises from the polling unit.
