Seven suspected hackers arrested – JAMB

The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board said on Monday that seven persons had been arrested for attempting to hack into the Virtual Private Network of the board.

The organisation’s Head of Information, Dr Fabian Benjamin, who disclosed this in an interview, said while the board was ready for the forthcoming examination, operatives of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps and the Department of State Services would fish out other members of the syndicate behind the hacking.

The PUNCH had reported that the syndicate got N20m from the deal to hack the JAMB VPN and a suspect, said to be the proprietor of one Bright Technologies and nabbed by the NSCDC, claimed that he got N600,000 as a share.

Benjamin noted that the seven suspects were arrested from Ogun, Oyo, Lagos and Abia states.

He said, “That dubious act has been on for some time now. The one reported from the NSCDC was one of the arrests made recently. The men made over N20m from the deal. At present, there are altogether seven suspects in the custody.

“Apart from the efforts by the NSCDC, we at JAMB from our investigations have also blocked all the platforms that the syndicate was using to penetrate our VPN.

“That is what we have done. We have routers which are location-based, but the syndicate goes through our routers and wants to expand the areas of coverage so that they can bring a lot of cyber cafes.

“You know we do not use cyber cafes. But the syndicate wants to bring in the cafes and make a lot of money from them. On the preparation for JAMB, we are good to go. The mock examination conducted attests to this fact. You will recall that over 1.5million candidates are now registered.”