eCitizen platform is among the websites that have dealt with cyberattacks, Information, Communication and Digital Economy Cabinet Secretary(CS) Eliud Owalo has confirmed.
Speaking during his appearance on Spice FM, the CS noted that the site was compromised this week.
“There was an attack. We are addressing that, we are not just coming up with instant remedial measures to address the current situation, we will build an elaborate risk mitigation framework. To me that was not strange because cyber-attacks are predominant world over,” he noted.
Owalo noted that no data has been accessed by the hackers and so far no files on the eCitizen platform that offers over 5,000 government services from ministries, county governments and agencies have been lost.
He explained that the hackers slowed down the sites but after learning about it they managed to secure the platform.
“They tried jamming the system by making more than ordinary requests into the system. It started by slowing down the system and we addressed it,” he said.
It wasn’t immediately clear who was responsible for the hacking incident, or the website disruptions and the CS did not delve into that.
Notably, he insisted that the incident should not cow the government from digitizing its services but rather influence the building of frameworks to ensure sustainable digitalization and to safeguard the platform from any potential data breaches in the future.
"We cannot stop digitizing our records and digitalizing our services because we are risk-averse," said Owalo.
