The National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) has said that the news of a data breach of the National identity database is ” false, a hoax and of mischievous intent.”
The NIMC disclosed this in a statement signed by Head, Corporate Communications, Kayode Adegoke on Wednesday, after viral posts of a data breach of 37 million records.
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- “The NIMC would like to assure the public that there has been no such breaches or incidents. Investigations on the alleged data dump were found to be non-existent.”
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NIMC said it investigated the claims and discovered that the database scheme presented by the alleged hackers did not tally with existing scheme of NIMC records.
- “The NIMC guarantees the security of the National Identity Database through various layers of security and can assure that no data was breached.”
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PRESS STATEMENT- NIMC DATA NOT BREACHED @DrIsaPantami @NgComCommission @FMoCDENigeria@NITDANigeria @Galaxybackbone @NIPOSTNG pic.twitter.com/gvORB8rcUI
— NIMC (@nimc_ng) December 23, 2020
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What this means
The NIMC alleges that it is very aware of plans to sell records of millions of Nigerian citizens allegedly stolen from their database. However, the database which is up for sale is fake. This comes as a first in data breach response from intuitional bodies, as most data breaches of this size and magnitude are usually not fake.
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What you should know
There was news of a data breach of 37 million records going viral.
So has NIMC, NITDA or Pantami's ministry said anything about the 37 million records of Nigerian's data put up for sale on the darkweb?
Or as usual, we are ignoring our problems..?
We never secure the one wey we get, but we wan collect more citizen data.
— Atsen (@atsen_) December 21, 2020
For context, the total number of registered Nigerians in NIMC database as at October 2020, was about 42million.
So 37m out of 42m exposed… And government is silent about this.
— Atsen (@atsen_) December 22, 2020
