[ISN] Cyber terrorism hits Nigeria

http://www.sunnewsonline.com/webpages/features/special-%20reports/2010/sept/25/special-report-25-09-2010-001.htm

By Emmanuel Mayah
Daily Sun
September 25,  2010
 
Life in Nigeria is pretty much becoming a video war game. In the past, 
you could choose to bump off an individual or an enemy organisation 
using letter bomb, price-tag assassins, corporate spies or attack dogs 
in white collar. Today, the thin line between reality and science 
fiction is blurred, so much so that a cripple with the right computer 
know-how can sit in one corner of his room and mobilise millions of 
zombies to cause an oil spillage in the Niger Delta or to hold a 
multinational hostage until a huge ransom is paid.

In Italy, not too long ago, a mob boss was shot but survived the 
shooting. That night, while he was in the hospital, the assassins hacked 
into the hospital computer and changed his medication so that he would 
be given a lethal injection. He was a dead man a few hours later. They 
then changed the medication order back to its correct form, after it had 
been incorrectly administered, to cover their tracks so that the nurse 
would be blamed for the “accident.”

Elsewhere in Nigeria, shockwave swept across the city of Lagos last year 
after a television house became the target of a bomb attack. The same 
effect was achieved three weeks back, as mainstream newspaper websites 
were brought down by unknown hackers.

One of the first people to discover the cyber siege was Nigerians in 
Diaspora, who rely on online newspapers to follow news and political 
developments back home. One of the sites affected was the 
sunnewsonline.com. Virtually all the sites were blank or had one 
stagnant old page that refused to move an inch no matter how hard you 
hit at the keys. In desperation, long-distance calls were coming in from 
the US, Europe, Australia, Asia, and other parts of the world. Everyone 
wanted to find out what was going on and, in the process triggered a 
cycle of panic that looked like the aftermath of a coup d’état.

[...]


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