Should Nigerians be Worried About the Army’s Crocodile Smile Cyberwarfare?
The Nigerian Army on Tuesday commenced a nationwide Cyber-warfare exercise tagged Crocodile Smile VI. According to the statement released, Crocodile Smile is an exercise designed to identify, track and counter negative propaganda on social media.
The cyber warfare exercise comes at a time when the continued protest against Police brutality is making waves across the country. Owing to the fact that the #EndSARS protests started online before growing into a strong offline movement, many feared that the exercise is a counter to stop online protests.
The army has however revealed that the current exercise has nothing to do with the protest. According to the army spokesman, the Exercise Crocodile Smile is a yearly exercise that holds from October to December and has nothing to do with the protest.
“To now insinuate that it is an exercise meant to stifle the ongoing EndSARS protest is, to say the least highly misinformed. Exercise Crocodile Smile (VI) has nothing to do with the ongoing protest and the NA has never been involved in the ongoing protest in any form whatsoever.”
The cyber warfare command is composed of 150 ICT specially trained officers and men drawn from all the Corps and Services in the Nigerian Army.
According to the army, the Command has acquired state of the art technical equipment, servers have been procured and experts from IBM have configured them to track, monitor and carry out ‘Distributed Denial of Service’ to terrorist and subversive elements.
It will also monitor the Army’s networks and advise Field Commanders on how to use the newly procured computer-based weapons systems recently installed to the Theatre of Operations.
According to the Nigerian Army, this is the first-ever Cyberwarfare exercise to be conducted in the history of the African Armed Forces.
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Cyber Warfare
It’s no longer news that the digital world has brought about a new type of danger – cyberwar. The new war is fought with the power of technology, attacking nation’s computers or information networks to…
