NIS and Ministry of Foreign affairs officials who travelled with President Uhuru to USA were deeply embarrassed when Chinese hackers took control of CS Amina Mohammed’s email account, diplomatic communication between Kenyan envoys to different countries and other top secret mails.
You know that this email thing is not really something which the ‘digital government’ loves but since it was such a campaign issue, they are trying to keep up with the KOT. The security of government website and servers in question as more of the Kenyan tech professionals continue to insist that the government host all its websites locally in the data centres which were built using tax payers’ money.
So after the Chinese hackers infiltrated Amina Mohammed’s mails and leaked all its content to many, the ICT Authority (former ICT Board) was called in by the NIS to rescue the situation. They didn’t manage to secure the mailing system as the infiltration continued. In the end, an IT team from United Nations was apparently called to help work with the ICT Authority and NIS to help secure the systems.
In the meantime, there is a brewing diplomatic spat between Kenya and China over the infiltration which the Office of the President called, ‘an act of war.’ The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is trying to have it resolved quietly as the Chinese see that they have an upper hand since they fund most of the country’s development projects in a major scale.
The system which was infiltrated by the Chinese hackers is called Zimbra. It is an open source unified communication collaboration system which touts itself as being very secure.
Immediately the Presidential entourage landed in Kenya, the Chinese ambassador to Kenya was immediately summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It is not clear what they discussed.
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