NIPOST’s website down, suffers DDoS attack

The website of the Nigerian Postal Service (NIPOST), www.nipost.gov.ng,  was under hackers’ attack yesterday as it could not be accessed.

But the country’s postal agency said the website was up and running.

However, a Daily Trust reporter who monitored the website yesterday could not gain entry into it on several attempts probably due to an attack called DDoS.

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic.

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How to identify a DDoS attack

A cyber security expert, Muinah Yokinwa, said the most obvious symptom of a DDoS attack is a site or service suddenly becoming slow or unavailable.

“But since a number of causes — such a legitimate spike in traffic — can create similar performance issues, further investigation is usually required,”  Yokinwa said.

Speaking with Daily Trust yesterday, NIPOST’s spokeswoman, Mrs C. O. Idris, said there was no attack on the agency’s website.