Kenyan officials said more than a billion cyber threats hit the nation in the final quarter of last year.
This is a huge jump from the 123 million cyber threats detected in the previous quarter. The Communications Authority of Kenya attributed the increase to a recent improvement in the country’s cyber threat monitoring capabilities, as well as increased exploitation of vulnerabilities by attackers targeting the growing number of internet devices in Kenya.
The local media reported it of the 1.2 billion detections, 13.2 million contained malware and 9.7 million were brute force login attempts. It is unclear how many of the detected cyber attacks were successful.
Edward Kisiang’ani, principal secretary for broadcasting and telecommunications at Kenya’s Ministry of ICT, said the government is upgrading its threat detection systems and training staff to deal with such threats. He also said the ministry is keen to “work with countries in the region to mitigate cross-border cyber threats”.