27/07/2023
e-citizen platform services resume
The Ministry of Interior has confirmed that services through the e-Citizen platform have resumed following a downtime since Sunday, July 23, 2023.
The Ministry says that the 'regrettable' downtime on the platform was occasioned by an attempted cyberattack.
- Here is the Ministry's statement -
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.
Our Cybersecurity Response Team has since established that the
momentary disruption was caused by an attempted cyberattack on the platform through Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) technique, which involved flooding the target system with massive traffic from multiple sources simultaneously.
Consequently, the platform was overloaded and rendered unavailable to genuine users thereby causing interference of the services. However, no data was accessed or lost during the incident, owing to the comprehensive data protection measures put in place by the responsible agencies.
The attack not only indicates that we are surrounded by malicious actors, both locally and internationally, but also vindicates the governmentβs relentless pursuit of stronger cybersecurity measures to safeguard our Critical Information Infrastructure and data from such threats.
We wish to inform members of the public that our technical teams are progressively reviewing the existing protective security controls in a deliberate effort to remain several steps ahead of agents of crime, whose intention is to detract us from the milestones we have made in the digital space.
Further, all members of the public, businesses, government institutions, and private entities are advised toenhance their cybersecurity preparedness and prioritize cybersecurity as part of the collective responsibility to ensure a safe cyber environment in the country.
