President’s official website hacked, hackers demand Ksh41 million ransom

The official website of the President has been hacked, and its homepage defaced with a message targeting President William Ruto and demanding a ransom in Bitcoin.

The website’s homepage, president.go.ke, showed that the official content has been replaced with demeaning messages targeting the Head of State.

The page displayed allegations against Ruto, a cryptocurrency wallet address and a demand for payment, with the hackers threatening to release unspecified information if their demands were not met.

“This message is the third time for you; before we leak everything about you. Do a payment of 5 bitcoins to the Bitcoin wallet…. If you want peace before 6 o’clock this evening,” the defaced homepage read.

In a brief statement to this publication on Saturday, July 18, State House confirmed it was aware of the hack and said its ICT team was handling the matter.

If State House honours the ransom demand, our calculations indicate Treasury would have to part ways with approximately Ksh41,337,872.40. This is based on an exchange rate where 1 BTC is trading at roughly Ksh8,267,574.48.

The hackers altered the website’s banner, displaying a message that referenced the names of three individuals while the official State House branding remained visible in the background.

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The incident has raised concerns over the security of government digital infrastructure, as it remains unclear whether the breach was limited to the website’s front page or extended to its back-end systems.

The latest incident is not the first time Kenyan government websites have been targeted in a cyberattack.

In November last year, several websites belonging to ministries and state agencies, including Health, Education, Labour, Environment, ICT, Tourism, Interior and State House, were compromised in a coordinated attack.

The attackers defaced the affected websites by replacing official content with unauthorised messages and rendering several government portals inaccessible.

The disruption affected key online services relied upon by members of the public, while some websites displayed extremist slogans and other unauthorised content.

However, the Ministry of Defence and the National Treasury were among the institutions reportedly unaffected by the cyberattack.

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