Kenya logs 2.7 billion cyber threat events in three months, and the CA confirms a government breach it won't name
The Communications Authority's national cyber team, KE-CIRT/CC, detected 2,696,335,021 threat events between July and September, about 29 million a day and 14.45% more than in the previous quarter, according to its latest quarterly cybersecurity report. Most are automated network scans and probes, but the categories that point at real break-in attempts grew fastest: brute-force password attacks rose 85% to 44.9 million, attacks on web applications rose 58% to 27.4 million and malware rose 20% to 70.8 million, while denial-of-service attacks fell 97%. Government systems are among the main targets in four of the six categories. The report also records, in a summary of the national cybersecurity committee's 23 September meeting, that the e-government sector suffered a breach "earlier this year" and is tightening data protection while working through audit requirements from the Data Protection Commissioner. It does not say which agency was hit, how attackers got in, whether personal data was taken or how many people were affected. In July the ICT Ministry disclosed an incident on the President's website and said it found no evidence of data theft, but the CA report does not link the two. On brute-force attacks, the report says successful compromises through vulnerable databases, weak logins and exposed remote-desktop access gave attackers access to critical systems, without giving figures. It blames poor patching, low awareness of phishing and attackers' growing use of AI, and recommends the basics: prompt updates, multi-factor authentication and well-run firewalls. Detected events are not breaches, but last week's PHP flaws and an 85% jump in password guessing are a reason to check that admin panels and remote access are not open to the internet with a password alone.
