The official website of the Central Bank of Nigeria has been hacked by Anonymous, a group of foreign Internet activists protesting police brutality in the country.
The group, prominent for hacking repressive government’s website, earlier announced its decision to attack federal government agencies’ websites in solidarity with the protesters clamouring for the reformation of the Nigerian police.
The largely peaceful protest is being staged in Lagos, Ibadan, Abuja and other major cities in the country. It has also gone beyond the police as Nigerians seized the opportunity to address major accountability issues such as seeking reduction in the allowance of lawmakers and improvement in all sectors.
The group of anonymous hackers has carried out similar coordinated attacks in the United States, Israel, Tunisia, Uganda and some other countries. Its motto is simply “we are anonymous.”
On Thursday, Newsflash247 reported how the official website of the Nigeria Police Force has been infiltrated after the group hacked into its database on Thursday.
Afterwards, the group released documents containing names, addresses, contacts and account details of hundreds of police officers on a text storage website, pastebin.com.
On Friday, the hackers announced that they had gained access to the Twitter account of National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) via the victim-agency’s account. They also posted #EndSARS protest materials on the agency’s twitter timeline.
On Friday night, the hackers disclosed the attack on CBN website, saying it is a cyber campaign against the Nigerian government.
“#Nigeria: International hackers & Anonymous continue the cyber campaign against the government to call out corruption, demand police reform, and show solidarity with brave protestors. #OpNigeria #EndSARS #EndPoliceBrutality #ReformTheNigerianPolice”
Checks by Newsflash247 showed that the apex bank’s website has gone offline for an internal server error.
“500 – Internal server error. There is a problem with the resource you are looking for, and it cannot be displayed,” the query read.
The HTTP status code 500 is a generic error response which means that the server encountered an unexpected condition that prevented it from fulfilling the request.
The spokesperson of the CBN could not be immediately reached for comments as his telephone was unavailable when filing this report.
