For three consecutive days, the official Twitter account of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Nigeria’s anti-graft agency, has been inaccessible.
It was learned that the outage is attributed to an alleged cyberattack by suspected “Yahoo Boys” (a colloquial term for Nigerian cybercriminals).
Checks by SaharaReporters on Thursday morning show that the account with over two million followers has disappeared. The page displayed: “This account doesn’t exist.”
The spokesman for the commission, Dele Oyewale also confirmed the outage during his conversation with The Gazette on Wednesday night.
According to the agency, the issue is attributed to a network problem, rather than a cyberattack as speculated.
The EFCC has assured that its ICT department is actively working to resolve the technical issue and restore access to the Twitter account.
He said, “Our ICT department is working on it. They have been on it for almost three days now. We are hoping It will come up again.”
SaharaReporters also observed that other social platforms of the agency were not affected by the outage.
According to The Gazette, the disappearance of EFCC’s X account came days after a group of suspected internet fraudsters vowed to launch a cyberattack on the agency.
The threats, posted on Reddit and other online forums, came in response to the EFCC’s recent crackdown on online activities deemed suspicious.
Some of the youths claimed that EFCC detectives had extorted them, prompting the threats of cyber warfare.
The disappearance of the EFCC’s Twitter account has sparked speculation about the potential impact of the threatened cyberattack.
Dozens of Nigerian netizens, particularly on X (formerly Twitter) have also raised concerns over reports that Guaranty Trust Bank’s (GTBank) website has been hacked.
The users took to the social media platform to express their worries and share screenshots of the allegedly compromised website, sparking fears about the safety of their personal and financial information with the bank.
The worried users also called on GTBank to address the situation urgently and reassure customers about the safety of their data.
