Kenya ICT minister admits cyber-attack on eCitizen portal, insists data secure
Thursday July 27 2023
Kenya's Information, Communication and Digital Economy Cabinet Secretary Eliud Owalo.
ICT Cabinet Secretary (CS) Eliud Owalo has admitted that the government's online services were affected by a cyber-attack.
The attack was by hackers who identified themselves as Anonymous Sudan. The CS, however, said that no data was lost during the attack and that the government was working around the clock to resolve the problem and secure the platform.
During an interview on Spice FM on Thursday morning, Owalo said the cyber-attack was not a strange problem, as it is prevalent around the world in this era of technology.
Read: Chinese hackers attacked Kenya State agencies
“What we need to put in place is an elaborate risk mitigation framework which we are ready for anyway. There was an attack, and we are addressing it,” said Owalo.
The CS said the government was not only coming up with remedial measures to deal with the current situation but was also putting in place measures to prevent future attacks.
Majority of Kenyans have been complaining on social media platforms for the past four days about the unavailability of government services through the portal.
They counter an error whenever they try to log on to the website and are unable to access thousands of government services.
The CS said that the attackers started by making the system work at a slower rate, which he said was being addressed.
Office of the Data Commission
While assuring Kenyans that their data is safe, the CS added that the government has been anticipating such attacks, hence the reason for the government to operationalise the Office of the Data Commission.
Read: Kenyan hackers nabbed in Kigali
“They tried jamming the system by making more than ordinary into the system…no data has been accessed, and no data has been lost,” he said.
He also assured Kenyans that there is no cause for alarm over the current cyber-attack, urging them not to panic.
“There is no cause for alarm, we have adequate capacity to address issues of cyber insecurity. I don’t want to say we are perfect because we should also be honest, we are enhancing our level of capacity within government to be able to mitigate against cyber insecurity,” he said.
He further said the portal would be back to normal before the end of the day.
On social media, Anonymous Sudan claimed to be targeting more government digital services.
“Kenyan retards are changing protection every few hours, first to Cloudflare now they switched to Radware. How pathetic, they don't know nothing can stand infront of us and we will…accounts.ecitizen.go.ke no matter the protection they put. We downed their shitty site for 3 days and counting. We hope Kenyans now know who the Sudanese are, and the next will be worse, we are preparing something very big,” the group said on Telegram.