Minister Reveals How Government Was Hacked

Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) Cabinet Secretary (CS) Joe Mucheru on Thursday admitted that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs servers had been hacked.

The CS revealed that the hackers managed to access some information by duping Ministry staff into clicking on compromised links requiring them to change their passwords but indicated that no confidential information was leaked.

“The said hackers were able to send the email to the Ministry, and some of the people in the Ministry actually responded. They clicked and changed their credentials. And some of the ones who were affected then sent emails to everybody else as spam,” he said.

According to Mucheru, the group only managed to get data described as classified open indicating that some of the hackers were Kenyan students.

“Most of the documents are classified open. They never got any classified documents,” he added.

The ICT boss said that the attack known as phishing could have been orchestrated by students in Kenyan universities.

“A lot of this has come from the Universities. One of the challenges of students working on Computer Science is how they can get into government,” he divulged.

However, Mucheru insisted that government data was safe and the hacking didn't compromise any records.

“We can't say that we shall be 100 per cent safe but we are comfortable so far. On this instance, it happened because people shared their passwords. We are secure with both email and hard copy ,” he affirmed.

On Thursday, it emerged that government documents had been leaked after the well known international network of activist and hacktivist identified as Anonymous indicated that it had accessed one Terabyte of data which it would release in bits.

Some of the information hacked into include email conversations, security related communication, international trade agreements and letters discussing the security situation in Sudan.

Read Also: Kenya Government Servers Hacked

 

 

 

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