Cyber Attacks Decrease by 59.9pc in Kenya due to Improved Security, CA says

Kenya experienced a massive decline of cyber threat attempts in the second quarter (April – June) of the year, the latest data from CA shows.

The market regulator, in its latest Sector Statistics report, says the National KE-CIRT/CC detected 13.9 million cyber threat attempts, down 59.9 percent from the 34.6 million attempts detected in Q1.

The Communication Authority of Kenya credited the colossal decline to “timely incident response mechanisms and increased endpoint security measures adopted to protect end-user devices.”

Majority of these cyber threat attempts were malware-based. In the period under review, the National KE-CIRT/CC detected 12,508,275 attempts leveraging malware, down 62.9 percent from Q1.

In contrast, Web Application attacks were up by 89.4 percent from Q1 with 1,102,840 attempts detected.

The National KE-CIRT/CC issued 20,864 advisories to the affected organizations, a tangible increase from the 17,844 in the foregoing quarter.

Threat advisories issued by the organization continues to rise, the report shows. Between July 2019 and June 2020, the National KE-CIRT/CC issued over 70,000 advisories, up from the nearly 50,000 issued in the previous period.

The latest report follows Kaspersky’s September data which showed increased cyber-attacks in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa.

Kaspersky detected12 million malware-based attacks from January to July in the country. The report also showed that Kenyans experienced 41 million attacks leveraging Potentially unwanted applications (PUAs).

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