Gov’t Says e-Citizen Services Back After Cyber Attack

Normal but optimal services resumed on the government’s e-Citizen platform following system interruptions by an attempted cyber attack.

ICT CS Eliud Owalo on Thursday confirmed that hackers attempted to compromise the system during the course of the week.

The Ministry of Interior and National Administration announced later that the platform is now operating optimally.

“We wish to notify the general public that services through the e-Citizen platform (ecitizen.go.ke) have resumed following a regrettable downtime since Sunday, July 23, 2023,” said the ministry.

Read: ICT CS Owalo Confirms Hacking Of E-Citizen Platform

“The momentary disruption was caused by an attempted cyber-attack on the platform through Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) technique, which involved flooding the target system with massive traffic from multiple sources simultaneously. The platform was overloaded and rendered unavailable to genuine users thereby causing interference of the services.”

But some users said they could not access it.

The government also denied claims that data had been stolen by the cyber criminals.

“No data was accessed or lost during the incident, owing to the comprehensive data protection measures put in place by the responsible agencies,” read the Interior ministry’s statement.

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“The attack not only indicates that we are surrounded by malicious actors, both locally and internationally, but also vindicates the government’s relentless pursuit of stronger cyber-security measures to safeguard our Critical Information Infrastructure and data from such threats.”

The ministry advised Kenyans, government and private institutions to prioritise and invest in cyber protection to reduce risks of cyber-attacks.