Services through the e-Citizen platform (ecitizen.go.ke) resumed on Thursday evening, after being down since Sunday, July 23, 2023.
Interior Cabinet Secretary Kithure Kindiki said the Cybersecurity Response Team has since determined that the temporary disruption was caused by an attempted cyberattack on the platform using Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) technique.
“The momentary disruption was caused by an attempted cyber-attack on the platform through Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) technique, which involved flooding the target system with massive traffic from multiple sources simultaneously. The platform was overloaded and rendered unavailable to genuine users thereby causing interference of the services,” said CS Kindiki in a statement.
The platform, which offers over 5,000 services, was now fully operational, said the ministry.
“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,” said the ministry.
The government maintains that no data was compromised or lost during the incident that saw several companies affected.
Cabinet Secretary for Information, Communication and Digital Economy Eliud Owalo had earlier also confirmed that the platform had suffered a cyberattack, disrupting its operations.
In a statement, CS Owalo confirmed that there was a cyber-attack on the e-Citizen platform, noting that the attackers attempted to disrupt the system by making more than normal requests to the system, which initially slowed it down.
“Yes, I was not surprised because cyberattacks are prevalent all over the world. There was an attack. We are addressing that, we are not just coming up with immediate remedial measures to address the current situation, we are going to put in place a sophisticated risk mitigation framework,” Owalo said.
He said the ministry had put in place stringent security measures to protect the platform from possible data breaches in the future.
“We cannot stop digitising our records and services because we are risk averse,” Owalo said.
The e-Citizen is a platform that allows Kenyans to access government services such as driving licence renewals, passport applications, business registration services and visas.
