Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization (KALRO) has disowned the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) website which has been hacked and defaced with pornographic content.
KALRO formed after merger
On Friday, the organisation said that it stopped using the domain in 2014 after a merger with the Coffee Research Foundation and the Kenya Sugar Research Foundation. Consequently, the management abandoned the previous website (kari.org) and created a new one kalro.org.
Speaking to a local media, a KALRO representative said hackers later took over the domain and efforts to regain access to the website have been unsuccessful.
Apparently, the matter was reported to the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) and is still under probe.
“Someone hijacked our old domains, and decided to publish obscene content. We had filed a report with the DCI, and we’ll follow up on the progress, especially now that the old website is causing us a lot of reputational harm,” said the KALRO representative adding that the institution's Director-General, Eliud Kiplimo Kireger, would address the matter 'comprehensively' later.
The website has been displaying x-rated material from Thursday, May 26 at around 2:00 pm.
The hackers aggregated pornographic material from different adult sites.
KARI shortly managed to pull down the x-rated content from its website as netizens started sharing screenshots on social media.
This is not the first time that a government organization has been hacked.
In 2019 the National Development Implementation and Technical Communication (NDICT) and ICT Authority-run Integrated Financial Management Information Systems (IFMIS) were hacked by Indonesian hackers.
A team calling itself Kurd Electronic Team left a series of incomprehensible text on the IFMIS website and disabled its functionality.
