Kenya Reports Cyber Attacks Causing Government System Outages

Cyber attackers targeted a digital platform used by Kenya's government to deliver services, the country's technology minister said, highlighting the vulnerabilities of the system. From a report: The attack on the e-Citizen platform in recent days caused system outages that left users unable to access a broad range of government services, ranging from passport applications to electricity payments. Some private companies were also affected.

It was "an unsuccessful attempt to overload the system through extraordinary requests, with the intention of clogging it," said Eliud Owalo, cabinet secretary for information technology, in a statement on Thursday. He said technical teams had blocked the source of the requests, adding that privacy and the security of data had not been compromised.

It's win95, just reboot it

[iAmWaySmarterThanYou]

How hard can that be?

Re:

[ls671]

Not nice from you to say that! More seriously, those reports of breaches have become boring on /. Maybe if they reported it on mainstream media to make average people aware it could help but nobody seems to really care. Bonus if they make kids in school aware of software and infrastructure security!

Re:

[evanh]

A DOS attack. :P

Re:

[ls671]

even more boring then but qualifies as "infrastructure security" as I mentioned :) heck, I even mitigate mild DOS attack pretty well at the software layer...

Re:

[trexgameaz]

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Does he mean a DDOS attack?

[Mirnotoriety]

"an unsuccessful attempt to overload the system through extraordinary requests, with the intention of clogging it,"

Re:

[transwarp]

"DDOS" would specifically be distributed, which makes it difficult to block the source. Their statement specified they "blocked the source IP address" so it sounds like a regular old DOS. They also only said "extraordinary" without qualifying volume or complexity. E.g. it could have been submitting a form with a crafted file upload or something instead. Neither of those should be unexpected, though.

Re:

[Mirnotoriety]

Clogging .. the Internet is a series of tubes /s

Norway

[Your Anus]

More like Snoreway!

It's not a cyberattack

[Bu11etmagnet]

It's just all those emails from Nigerian princes and the widow of Kadhafi, clogging up the Internet.