Department of State Services (DSS) on Wednesday said that it found from its search of the Lagos office of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in November last year that the party planned to hack into the database of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to manipulate records.
This frightening revelation, which if true portends great trouble for the 2015 elections, was made by Marilyn Ogar, DSS deputy director (Public Relations), at a media briefing in Abuja.
She said that after preliminary investigations, the DSS “suspects there was an elaborate and well articulated plan to inflate the party’s membership data as well as hack into INEC voter registration database.”
APC however dismissed the findings as hogwash, a great disservice to Nigeria and an embarrassment to all intelligence-gathering organisations around the world.
But Ogar said the raid on the APC’s office was carried out after a tip off that some cloning activities were going on in a building located at No. 10, Bola Ajibola Street, Ikeja, Lagos, without a signpost, banner or flag to indicate that it was a party office.
She said a permit was obtained for the operation during which the DSS officials found some items, which suggested that there was a well-hatched plan to hack into the electoral body’s database and corrupt it “and replace it with their own data.”
The DSS said that from its findings, the APC plans to scythe the system in a way that would enable them to manipulate even media reports in a predetermined direction. Ogar explained that a well articulated manual to perform all these tasks were served on the hard drive recovered from the office.
She listed the items recovered from the APC’s office as “a temporary voter’s card, a permanent voter’s card and some hard drives (one of the hard drives recovered from the building contained a video of twenty-one (21) hacking tutorials.)’’
According to the DSS, the tutorial video focused on how to become a hacker and steps to take to avoid detection in the process of hacking web servers, steps and procedures of system hacking, passwords cracking, decrypting, escalating access privileges, and creating backdoors to servers.
Ogar said the video “also explicitly explained how to evade security of databases such as Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), firewalls and other measures put in place to deter hackers.
“The video outlined ways to identify vulnerabilities in systems and how to surreptitiously drop a USB flash drive in a target establishment, which when plugged into any computer, transmits malicious codes enough to gain access into and compromise the entire system of the target organisation. And how to hack into the systems of media houses, with the aim of broadcasting fake stories or headlines.”
While displaying pictures of underaged Nigerians allegedly registered as members of the APC, Ogar said registering underaged and infants as party members is contrary to the party’s constitution as contained in Article 9.1 which states that “membership of the party shall be open to any citizen of Nigeria who has attained the age of eighteen (18) years…”
The DSS alleged that: “Furthermore, the APC had multiple registrations of individuals in multiples of 16, 12, and 10.”
According to the DSS spokesperson, it was also discovered that some foreigners as well as security operatives were registered members of the party thereby putting a question mark on their understanding of the legitimate provision that all security personnel in the country must not be or be seen to be partisan.
“The APC registered several security personnel from the Nigerian Army (NA), the Nigeria Police Force (NPF), Nigeria Customs Service (NCS), Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) and Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC), among others, in their uniforms as members of the party. Several foreigners were also registered as its members,” the agency revealed.
The DSS expressed concern that the APC filled forms without passport photographs, and have books containing names of people with their phone numbers, as well as several envelopes containing passport photographs of various individuals.
While stating the position of the DSS that APC has plans to infiltrate the database of the electoral body “through the creation of party membership forms and cards to match INEC’s voters’ register across the country,” Ogar reiterated that the opinion expressed by some people “on the action of the service” cannot conceal the sacrosanct of truth.
It would be recalled that when the said residence was raided last year, some officials of APC were arrested and detained by the DSS. The party, through its spokesman, Lai Mohammed, came out with a statement demanding public apology from the service and immediate announcement of its findings.
He further accused the service of seeking to manufacture evidence to support its alleged faulty intelligence by delaying the announcement after a number of days.
Mohammed was quoted to have then said: “We are now asking them to immediately announce their findings to the world. After all, it took them only a few hours after their Gestapo-like invasion of our offices before they issued their baseless allegation of PVC cloning to justify their action.”
Ogar said those arrested have being released on bail, investigation is still continuing, as the DSS would take more evidences and the information acquired from some of the suspects to court for further litigation.
In a statement issued in Abuja yesterday by Mohammed, APC also alleged that the timing of the release of the ‘findings’ was a plot orchestrated in collusion with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to distract the APC from its ongoing campaigns for next month’s elections.
It described as disingenuous, flimsy, premeditated, partisan and an irritant the conclusion that the APC had an ‘’articulated plan to inflate the party’s membership data as well as hack into INEC’s voters’ registration database through the creation of party membership forms and cards to match INEC’s voters’ register across the country.’’
The APC statement reads in part: ‘’First the DSS and the PDP said the APC was cloning Permanent Voters Cards at the raided office, without a shred of evidence. Now, after a ‘painstaking’ investigation, the DSS has found out that the APC was only planning to inflate its membership data and then hack into INEC’s database. And this is the outcome of its massive, months-long investigations?
‘’This would have been funny if it were not from a primary domestic intelligence agency saddled with a great responsibility. Can this wishy-washy report stand any serious scrutiny? Can any serious intelligence gathering agency anywhere else in the world take this report seriously? With these kind of findings, one can now understand why Boko Haram has continued to strike at times and places of its own choosing without any prior knowledge by our all-powerful DSS.
‘’We have always warned that our democracy is in clear and present danger, not just from desperate politicians, but also from institutions of state that have compromised in their roles and resorted to crass lawlessness. The DSS’ ‘findings’ today have given us another reason to repeat this.”
‘’While we are willing to meet the DSS in court, we can confidently say that the ‘confessions’ extracted from the arrested persons, after they were subjected to incredible acts of torture, cannot even stand in any court of law,’’ APC said.
