Between April and June this year, the Kenyan Cyber space recorded more than 1 billion attacks compared to the 971.4 million threats recorded in the preceding quarter.
- Similarly, Cyber advisories from the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) grew from 8.5 million in the January quarter to 9.3 million in the April quarter.
- The data from the authority highlighted that system vulnerabilities within Kenyan firms rose from 871.2 million between January and March, to 1.065 billion in the quarter under review.
- Interestingly, other cyber threats like malware attacks, brute force attacks, DDOS, web and mobile application attacks declined in the April quarter this year compared to the January quarter.
Malware attacks fell from 33 million between January and March to 31 million between April and June while DDOS incidences dropped significantly from 38 million in the January quarter to 7 million in the quarter under review.
The authority attributed the steady rise in incidences to its vivified efforts to detect attacks and stem future cyber threats. Moreover, new regulations in the sector have forced Kenyan firms to strengthen their cyber security measures.
In July last year, cyber attackers targeting private sector and the public service unsuccessfully gained access to government services portals.The attack on Government websites sought to overload the systems with extraordinary requests, with intention of clogging it.
Over 5,000 government services from 100 plus ministries, counties, departments and agencies available on the e-citizen platform were not accessible due to the attack. It was a clarion call to the CA that immediate action needed to be taken to protect the national Cyber space.
