Cyber-attack: Travelers to be issued with visas on arrival in Kenya
Travellers will be issued visas on arrival at Kenya’s ports of entry, the government has announced.
According to a statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, all airlines have been advised to board travellers bound for Kenya.
This follows a reported cyber-attack on the eCitizen platform this week, which has affected the processing of e-visa.
“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs presents its compliments to all diplomatic missions and international organisations in Kenya and has the honour to inform that there is currently a challenge on the government’s eCitizen platform, which is affecting the processing of e-visa,” the Ministry said.
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The eCitizen is a platform that allows Kenyans to access government services such as driving licence renewals, passport applications, business registration services and visas.
“The Ministry takes this opportunity to renew assurances of its highest consideration to all diplomatic missions and international organisations in Kenya.”
In a statement on Thursday, Cabinet Secretary for Information, Communication and Digital Economy Eliud Owalo confirmed that there was a cyber-attack on the eCitizen platform, noting that the attackers attempted to disrupt the system by making more than normal requests to the system, which initially slowed it down.
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However, Mr Owalo said no data was accessed by the hackers and no data was lost.
“Yes, I was not surprised because cyber-attacks are prevalent all over the world. There was an attack. We are addressing that, we are not just coming up with immediate remedial measures to address the current situation, we are going to put in place a sophisticated risk mitigation framework,” Owalo said.
He said the ministry had put in place stringent security measures to protect the platform from possible data breaches in the future.
“We cannot stop digitising our records and services because we are risk averse,” Owalo said.
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