Gov’t says e-Citizen services back online after cyber attack scare

Normal services have resumed on the government's e-Citizen platform following system interruptions spurred by an attempted cyber attack.

The development was preceded by ICT CS Eliud Owalo on Thursday confirming that hackers attempted to compromise the system during the course of the week.  

In a subsequent statement however, the Ministry of Interior and National Administration announced 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.

"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.

The Prof. Kithure Kindiki-led ministry however echoed CS Owalo's earlier sentiments in which he allayed fears that sensitive information from the platform had been accessed 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.

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