Kenya's cybersecurity authorities have acknowledged a breach in the e-government sector earlier this year, but the Communications Authority of Kenya's (CA) latest quarterly report does not say which system was hit, how attackers got in or whether personal data was exposed, according to Techweez.
Techweez drew on the CA's Cybersecurity Report, 43rd Edition, and a summary of the 56th meeting of the National KE-CIRT/CC Cybersecurity Committee, held in Nairobi on 23 September. At the meeting the e-government sector called for stronger protection of information assets and a more proactive approach to data security, while working to meet audit requirements raised by the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner.
The report does not link the breach to the president's website. On 18 July, the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Digital Economy said the ICT Authority had detected a cybersecurity incident on that site, restricted access to contain it and begun forensic investigations. It said it had found no evidence at that stage of unauthorised access to sensitive data, data theft or information loss. Techweez says the timing makes that the nearest public match but stresses that the report does not connect the two.
The report recorded almost 2.7 billion threat events, a 14.45% increase on the previous quarter, according to Techweez. Malware attempts rose 20.01% to 70.8 million, web-application attacks rose 57.62% to 27.4 million and brute-force attacks rose 85.41% to 44.9 million, while denial-of-service attacks fell 97.18% to 23,124. The report attributes the rise largely to inadequate patching, low awareness of phishing and attackers' growing use of AI.
In the brute-force category, the report says successful compromises, largely tied to vulnerable databases, weak authentication and insecure remote desktop settings, gave attackers access to critical systems and exposed sensitive information, but it gives no figures.
Source: Techweez