Afrigather Opeyemi Awoyemi is a expertise entrepreneur. Asides founding Jobberman, the job web site; he based Whogohost, a number one Nigerian area registrar with 60% .ng market share and likewise manages a site registry. He tweets through @opeawo
This week, Nigerians woke as much as the information that gtbank.com was down.
As an knowledgeable within the area house for over 18 years, I deem it essential to place some information on the market to tell the general public on the difficulty. I based a number one area registrar, Go54, previously generally known as Whogohost that serves over 150,000 companies and organizations in Nigeria with area and internet hosting providers together with GTBank and now additionally manages a site registry (.cv).
GTBank’s downtime has been chalked as much as a failure to resume their area title. Public WhoIs data courting way back to 2021 refutes that. GTBank has been with the identical registrar (Register.com) over time and its nameservers stay the identical within the data under from 2020 and 2024 (see up to date date). Nothing has modified within the area configurations.
The data additional reveal that the GTBank.com area was registered with Wild West Domains LLC way back to 2011, then moved to Register.com in 2017. In the identical 12 months, they added a privateness service to protect the possession of the area. This can be a frequent observe to guard private privateness (I extremely suggest this in case your registrar provides it) and doesn’t suggest any wrongdoing or intent to cowl up. Because of this the area contact reveals up as PERFECT PRIVACY, LLC.
The actual challenge lies with the service itself.
In my analysis, I used to be additionally in a position to pull all their historic A, MX and TXT data to see if something had modified. The one change is the above, the place a brand new A document has been added on sixteenth of August to level to servers at Confluence Networks. Domains sometimes use a number of A data to handle load balancing or redundancy.
This means that there’s a problem on the web site they’re attempting to repair and this could possibly be an information middle challenge, human error or one thing way more sinister like a DDOS assault (denial of service) or ransomware assault.
A number of monetary establishments have been hit previously with the latter, and if historical past is something to go by, the financial institution might be doing what each financial institution is prone to do: maintain the true points to themselves.
My expertise within the area house and the latest CrowdStrike challenge have made me realise that typically expertise and human error fail us and we’d like extra or one other expertise to repair or stop issues. Although tremendous helpful and practically indispensable, the web can also be turning into an more and more harmful place and all of us should be cautious.
Is the GTBank challenge a case of incompetence? Unlikely. Incompetence is simple to repair: change data and deploy. It’s #GTBankFail at present and it is likely to be one other monetary establishment’s tomorrow. That is one reality about how expertise can fail companies.
There’s numerous stuff you, the typical Dauda or Yemisi can’t management. However these you are able to do. Don’t put your eggs in a single basket. Your eggs are no matter account steadiness you could have, be it ₦10,000 or ₦100 million. Have a number of financial institution accounts. Use two-factor authentication. Use totally different passwords to your e-mail and banking apps (even when that you must provide you with a system that solely ). The place attainable, use passwordless logins.
Keep secure and knowledgeable.
