The website of the Foundation for Investigative Journalism (FIJ) has suffered multiple coordinated cyberattacks traceable to the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) headquarters in Abuja.
According to the Web head of the FIJ, the website's service provider first discovered the issue.
According to an FIJ report on Friday, the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, which briefly knocked FIJ’s website offline, began on Thursday morning.
DDoS attacks occur when hackers overwhelm a website with massive amounts of fake traffic, often generated by networks of compromised computers known as botnets. The onslaught overloads the server, preventing legitimate visitors from accessing the site and ultimately causing it to crash.
The cyberattack on the FIJ came just days after the outlet published a series of investigations exposing how registered companies and private individuals were illegally selling Nigerians’ National Identification Number (NIN) data on the black market.
Technical analysis revealed that a single IP address had bombarded FIJ’s website with over 50,000 requests in just one hour. Further investigation highlighted the scale and sophistication of the attack.
In July 2025, FIJ exposed NINPrint, a platform operated by Abbeytech Ventures, for selling NIN records at as low as N180 per request. FIJ tested the platform by purchasing the data of four Nigerians who provided consent.
On August 8, FIJ reported that NINCard had been illegally offering ID services since October 2023 without a license, with the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) aware of the operation for over a year but failing to intervene.
Just four days later, FIJ revealed that nimcverify.ng was selling Nigerians’ NIN records for N150 to anyone with a phone number.
In its most recent investigation, FIJ detailed how IloTech, a virtual top-up platform, was selling NIN records for as low as N180 each. Using the platform, FIJ obtained records of prominent figures, including Festus Keyamo, Minister of Aviation and Aerospace Development, and Orji Uzor Kalu, Senator representing Abia North.
The newspaper noted that, following a tip-off, it discovered IloTech was handling personal data of Nigerians without a license from NIMC, the government authority responsible for such services.
All illegal websites highlighted by FIJ were subsequently shut down, often within 24 hours of reporting and no longer than seven days in all cases.
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