E-Citizen services back online, declares government

By Peter Ochieng

The government has announced resumption of E-Citizen services online.

This comes in the wake of a reported failed cyber attack, leading to crippling of servives on the platform, among them processing visa endorsements.

The Ministry of Interior in a statement on Thursday evenning, said the platform is up, after going down on Sunday.

“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," states the statement.

"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."

The ministry insisted that no data was lost, adding that the attack may have been orchestrated by local and international actors.

"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 government’s relentless pursuit of stronger cyber-security measures to safeguard our Critical Information Infrastructure and data from such threats," said the Interior ministry.