My research is conclusive that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is a target of a well-coordinated ‘narrative attacks’ through professionally written disinformation, and misinformation aimed at manipulating public perception by a deluge of harmful contents.
This narrative attack can be tagged ‘Distributed Denial of Trust (DDoT).
This multifaceted information warfare technique assaults human perception by disrupting normal or ordinary dialogues on the social media.
The current DDoT attacks are designed to undermine the integrity of information exchange on the Internet and elsewhere thereby eroding public trust in individuals or leaders like President Tinubu, his government, in public institution and even in big companies and corporations.
Before and during the elections, a bus load of lies were spread on the social media against President Tinubu and you would have thought that at the close of election, the attacks will abate.
Not at all. In fact, my research shows that it is now more coordinated and specialized tools are currently in use.
During the protest titled “#End Bad Government”, I noticed that narratives, which ordinarily could be tagged as dominant perspectives in online conversations and spread organically by ordinary users or influencers in good faith, are actually attacks deployed via one or two central command units set up to push a torrent of manipulated contents through a network of controlled accounts known as ‘sock puppets’ and often by ‘Bot farms’.
Unfortunately, narrative attacks are not expensive to achieve through the social media ecosystem in Nigeria and through unwary individuals who do not bother to think on any content before forwarding it into groups and individuals.
In this case, the well- provisioned threat actor can simultaneously leverage the many -sided information environment to create a groundswell network of account crisscrossing at a great speed from X to WhatsApp and many others.
What I also found was that many Community Development Associations(CDAs) at the grassroot levels have highly functioning WhatsApp accounts which are targeted for DDoT attacks in order to stimulate confusion, and sow perpetual dissonance that could ultimately erode public trust, ethnic and communal harmony.
I chose to put this article in the public space because the attacks on the government and the personality of the president is rising to more sophisticated techniques such as hashtag hijacking and encrypted spamming.
Also at a breakneck speed, the bad actors are increasingly harnessing these techniques to spin pre- meditated harmful narratives from captured ‘super-nodes’, that is; individual or accounts with wide reach or great influence.
These captured accounts could be controlled by skillful individuals or are automated through scripted bots which are lined by networks that synchronously amplify disinformation.
Meanwhile, I have no doubt that at least two security agencies; one operating in Nigeria and the other operating intimationally are more than capable to counter these ever scaling threats.
However, with the entrance of low cost, high fidelity multimodal generative AI, the threat has become more expansive and deadly credible.
What this means is that with generative AI, it becomes easier for bad actors to manufacture dangerous and misleading “reality” from end to end.
They are now able to deploy a deluge of deceptive and inflammatory contents both in sight & sound and in written forms to distort the information landscape. So, what gives?
While I am not sure of the exact level of investment in cybersecurity operations in all the intelligent communities in Nigeria or the space eyed for it in the 2025 budget, my first take is that President Tinubu should personally see that very good investment is made into training and tooling in these agencies in a continuum.
I am well informed that the president is a “hands-on-manager”, but this great attribute should not be limited to rallying investors and systematic fight against corruption only.
Please note that DDoT campaigns have overarching aim of manipulating cognitive biases and people’s emotional triggers in order to steer public sentiment and behavior directly into pre-determined actions.
A cursory look at riots worldwide is apt.
Although we have the Ministry of Information Technology, yet I believe that the Office of National Security Adviser (NSA) should oversee or coordinate a massive investment to scale up capabilities in cybersecurity.
Although DDoT is analogous to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), in the cyber attack sphere, both now required new frameworks in terms of investment unlike anything ever known in cyber warfare before now.
For example, on the evening of July 30 the Ukrainian main intelligence Directorate (HUR) executed a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on the Russian Federation.
It is perhaps one of the largest the world have ever seen.
The DDoS disrupted Russia’s internet infrastructure, and vital key resources and obtained a wide range of confidential data.
It is not in question again why Russia never saw the Ukrainian invasion of the Kursk region coming.
Also, and a hard lesson to learn are the various disruptions of online services of all major Russian banks, including the Central Bank, telecommunication, service providers, national payment systems, social networks and messenger services.
All government resources and agencies were captured in the cyber attack while it last.
Imagine the confusion, the impotence and blame game in Moscow.
Have they recovered?
No. They are repairing and tidying up what can be done after the fact.
What can we learn from these attacks? How will Nigeria fare if it were here?
President Bola Tinubu should oversee the modernization of our cybersecurity infrastructure investment in the purchase of cutting-edge tools and training and retraining with right pegs in the holes.
Physical combats are being limited by cyber attacks.
Many types of jamming and corresponding cluster-level mapping like local/regional jamming devices and intra/inter-cluster jamming and hybrid jamming are making great strides in today’s warfare.
Although the fast frequency hopping systems are deployed in Russia, yet all manners of UAV or Drones are destroying their multi-million dollar equipments in jiffies.
Also Read:Middle Belt not part of Arewa- Fulani country — MBF leader
Chibok: 1,680 school children abducted in 10 years — UNICEF
Insecurity:Matawale calls for increased military operations to curb insecurity
Meanwhile, skillful state actors are going rogue and politicians are investing in DDoT against general or major elections.
This is the time to use every available information dissemination organs of the government to educate CDAs on the dangers of spreading disinformation.
It is time to make bold investment in purchasing right equipments and it is time to source for new talents, re-train old and experienced hands and resolve to pay the teams uncommon salaries. Time to act is NOW!
Olusegun Olurin is the Chief Vision Officer at Fadaka Technologies Limited. info@fadaka.tech
