Gov’t says travellers to get Visas on arrival after cyber attack on eCitizen portal

The Ministry of Foreign and Diaspora Affairs now says that Kenya-bound passengers will be granted VISAs upon their arrival in the country owing to difficulties in processing the Passport endorsements on the e-Citizen platform.

This follows the confirmation of a cyber-attack on the e-Citizen platform by ICT Cabinet Secretary Eliud Owalo.

"There is currently a challenge in the Government e-Citizen platform, which is impacting processing of e-visa," Foreign Affairs Principal Secretary Korir Sing'oei said in a statement.

"Therefore, travelers will be issued Visa upon arrival at all entry points to Kenya."

The ministry likewise urged all airlines to on-board travellers destined to Kenya.

In an interview on Spice FM, CS Owalo noted that the cyber attack was reported earlier this week.

“To me that was not strange because cyber-attacks are predominant world over,” Owalo said.

“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.”

The ICT CS went on to explain what happened during the latest attack.

“They tried jamming the system by making more than ordinary requests into the system. It started by slowing down the system and we address it,” he said.

He however assured Kenyans that no sensitive data was compromised by the hackers.