Cybercriminals turn to high-tech methods as attacks rise 268pc

Kenya has reported a 268.9% rise in cyber threats between the month of July and September in what has been aided by attackers resorting to sophisticated means to infiltrate systems.

According to the first quarter statistics by the Communications Authority, the number of threats rose from 38.8 million during the last quarter ending June to reach 143 million by close of September.

“The rise in cyber threat events detected was attributed to the significant increase in targeted attacks at critical systems and services; increased activity by ransomware groups; adoption of more sophisticated tools by cyber threat actors, increased targeted attacks at Internet of Things (IoT) devices,” said CA.

During the period under review, CA noted that there were also increased exploits of third-party mobile application vulnerabilities, targeted attacks at unsecured infrastructure, adoption of botnet and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack techniques.

There has been a rise in internet usage since the coronavirus pandemic struck in March last year as firms, organisations, and consumers moved online to ensure business continuity due to reduced physical contact aimed and curbing COVID-19 spread.

CA says it further issued 73,578 cyber threats advisories, a 183.3% increase when compared to the previous quarter when the advisories stood at 26, 000.

However, total investigated cases declined 53.3% to 247 from 529 in the quarter ending June 2021.

As of 30th September 2021, the number of mobile phone devices accessing mobile networks stood at 59 million, out of which 33 million were feature phones and 26 million smartphones.

“In Q1 of the Financial Year 2021/22, the number of active SIM cards subscribed to mobile data/Internet services declined by 2.4% to record 44.88 million subscriptions from 46 million subscriptions recorded during the preceding quarter. The number of mobile data subscriptions reported by Safaricom PLC declined by a similar margin due to the conclusion of the various data promotions aimed at attracting new customers during the previous quarter,” said CA.

The penetration levels of feature phones and smartphones stood at 67.9% and 53.4% respectively, CA stated in the report.

Safaricom was the leading mobile broadband provider with 65% of subscriptions followed by Airtel Networks at 27.9% while Telkom had 5.6% share, Equitel 0.6% and Jamii Telecom 0.8%.

“Mobile broadband subscriptions gained by 0.53% to stand at 26.90 million, which implies that there was increased demand and uptake of higher Internet speeds by a majority of the subscribed mobile data/Internet users.”

Continuous 4G rollout across the country saw 140 million gigabytes of broadband consumed by 13.9 million subscribers while 3G with 13 million subscriptions had 68.5 million gigabytes consumed within three months.