The Kenyan government has confirmed a cyberattack on its main online platform that deliver services to the public that lasted most of this week, but said no data was stolen.

The e-Citizen portal is used by the public to access over 5,000 government services, including passport applications and renewals, driving licenses, identification cards and national health records.

“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," the Ministry of Interior and National Administration said in a 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,” it said.  

The ministry said that the platform was overloaded and rendered unavailable, causing interference of the services.

"No data was accessed or lost during the incident, owing to the comprehensive data protection measures put in place by the responsible agencies," the ministry said.

The attack was claimed by hackers who identified themselves as Anonymous Sudan on social media, who warned of worse to come, saying “we are preparing something very big.”

Kenya’s government has not confirmed this claim.

The country’s main mobile money transfer service owned by telco Safaricom as well as other similar transaction platforms owned by banks were disrupted on Thursday, affecting transfers and payments to Kenyan companies including banks and utilities.

It is not clear whether this was related to the cyberattack. Neither Safaricom nor the banks affected had issued an official statement on the money transfer outages.

(Editing by Brinda Darasha; brinda.darasha@lseg.com)