Government admits State House website hacked

The government has admitted that President William Ruto's official website, president.go.ke, was hacked.

State House confirmed the breach in a statement, saying its Information and Communications Technology (ICT) team was working to restore the site and investigate how the attackers gained access.

ICT Cabinet Secretary William Kabogo said they were aware of reports regarding a cybersecurity incident affecting the official website of the President.

In a statement, Kabogo said that upon detection of the incident, ICT Authority immediately activated established cybersecurity incident response protocols.

“As a precautionary measure, access to the Presidential website was temporarily restricted to facilitate containment, forensic analysis and restoration efforts,” he stated

Kabogo said appropriate mitigation measures had since been implemented, and restoration of the website was underway.

“At this time, there is no evidence of unauthorized access to sensitive data, data exfiltration, or loss of information. Government systems and digital services remain secure and operational,” the CS added

Initially, the website reported that it was not found on various search engines, then later responded that it was under maintenance in what IT experts have linked to hacking.

Users attempting to access the site were met with an error message, with the portal remaining unreachable hours after the breach was first noticed.

Some users who had earlier attempted to access the website reported noticing that the homepage had been disfigured with messages targeting the government, alongside a cryptocurrency wallet address and a demand for 5 bitcoins.

Further, the attackers threatened to leak unspecified information about the president if the payment was not made by 6 pm the same day.

They posted, "do a payment of 5 bitcoins to the Bitcoin wallet" before releasing what they claimed was compromising material.

Software developer Patrick Soi argues that, mostly, hackers target websites with useful information not necessarily to take them down but to deny the user service.

“Kenya does not have enough capacity of servers that host websites; that is why they are easily breached. Further, these websites are designed by humans who know how to take them down,” he explains.