State Explains How Sudanese Hackers Targeted Govt Websites & Companies

ICT Cabinet Secretary, Eliud Owalo revealed on Thursday, July 27 that no data was compromised after a Sudanese hacker group claimed to have taken down a number of Kenyan websites including key government sites like e-Citizen and top companies.

Statements earlier posted by Sudan Annonymous claimed that the move to target the Kenyan websites was motivated by their protest against Kenya's alleged interference with the country's affairs, though the group did not substantiate how Kenya was meddling with the affairs of Sudan.

Government websites offering services to Kenyans like e-Citizen and NTSA have been experiencing downtimes since Monday, July 24, affecting applications and renewal of Driving Licences, birth certificates, business registrations, marriage certificates, passports, and certificates of good conduct among others. 

CS Owalo, who spoke during an interview with Spice FM, confirmed that the attack took place but asserted that it would not prevent the government from digitizing all its records and services as planned by President William Ruto.

He assured that the government was coming up with instant responses to future cyber attacks, including a response to the latest government hack, and put in place a risk-mitigation framework to improve the country's cyber security.

"Yes, and to me that is not strange because cyber attacks are predominant the world over. We cannot stop digitizing our records and services because we are risk-averse. What we need to put in place is an elaborate risk-mitigation framework which we are ready for anyway.

"There was an attack, we are addressing that, we are not just coming up with instant remedy of measures to address the current situation, we are ensuring that around this digitization space, we are building an elaborate risk-mitigation framework for purposes of sustainable digitization," the CS explained.

Owalo further noted that the hackers had attempted to make a series of requests, more than usual, which slowed down the systems.

"This latest one what they did is they tried jamming the system by making more than ordinary requests into the system and slowing down the system and we addressed it. No data has been accessed, no data has been lost. 

"Because we had foreseen this, we established and operationalised the Office of the Data Commissioner and anchored it on the law to ensure that they execute the mandate of both data privacy on one hand and data security on the other," he added.

Viral Tea learnt that the system first experienced issues when users sought services before it became inaccessible. Reports indicated that the hacks spread to blue-chip firms including a leading media outlet as the hackers allegedly protested President William Ruto's meddling in Sudanese internal affairs.

Private companies managed to restore their websites within hours after they were victims of the daring hacks, but it was government websites that were the most vulnerable, as most of them did not have proper web security features.

As a team of experts works to restore normalcy to e-Citizen, millions of Kenya risk missing over 5,000 government services that have been shifted online. The government-to-citizen (G2C) online platform was launched in 2014 and has been targeted by hacking groups on numerous occasions. 

The Sudan Annonymous Hacker group has also claimed that they have managed to access sensitive data, including the personal information of Kenyan citizens.

However, it has not issued any demands as is usually the case with many technical breaches on government services online.