👨🏿‍🚀TechCabal Daily – Lie detector test for SIM cards

If you’ve ever walked into your house only to find a stranger has changed the locks and left a note on the door, you’ll have a fair idea of how Kenya’s information technology (IT) team felt on Thursday. 

On July 18, William Kabogo Gitau, Kenya’s tech minister, confirmed a detail that most citizens have speculated for several hours. The country’s official website was hit by a cybersecurity attack. Reports circulating in the media said the attackers had held the state to ransom and demanded 5 Bitcoins, worth KES 41.3 million ($320,000).

However, Gitau said that there was “no evidence of unauthorised access to sensitive data, data exfiltration, or loss of information.” As of Monday, however, the website was back functioning, and for those engineers who worked overtime, the nights of pumping caffeine probably paid off.

But, according to a new report by the Communications Authority of Kenya (CAK), the country’s telecoms, IT, and digital economy regulator, these incidents happen more frequently than anybody cares to keep count of.

What happened? According to the regulator, web application attacks targeting government systems and Internet service providers (ISPs) increased by 43.7%, rising from about 12.1 million in the previous quarter to 17.4 million by June. If you do the maths, this means hackers attacked these platforms about 191,000 times a day, or 133 times every minute. That’s some never-give-up spirit. 

But why is this happening at such an alarming rate?

Explain like I’m new here: Every website has a front door, the page you see, and a back room where databases, logins, and software do the actual work. A web application attack is an…