Kenya’s financial system crashed by Russia-linked Anonymous Sudan
Kenya has been hit by a major cyber-attack by Anonymous Sudan, a Russian affiliated hackers group at a time President William Ruto skipped the Russia African summit amid heightened geopolitical realignment over the war in Europe.
The attack caused an outage of more than 5,000 public services in Kenya for more than 48 hours while disabling Internet-based and mobile payment platforms for several banks. The attack also froze activities on the ubiquitous M-PESA through the internet bases mobile application.
Anonymous Sudan launched the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) cyber-attack that jams networks, in retaliation for involvement in the Sudan Peace process as head of the IGAD quartet.
The Sudanese army has rejected Kenya’s involvement claiming President William Ruto is partisan over his previous involvement with the head of RSF militia General Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, also known as Hemetti.
Security analysts who have been monitoring the group since it launched similar attcks on Microsoft, Israel and Sweden recently that the group is actually affiliated with Russia.
The group launched a DDoS attacks in Sweden and Turkey ahead of the European country’s bid to join NATO, claiming retaliation against Sweden was for its support over the burning of a Quran by Danish Swedish right wing activist Rasmus Paludan.
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Expensive paid servers to launch attacks
However data analysts point to the timelines of the Group’s formation before the Quran burning, the fact that this attacks vary in patterns form hacktivists Anonymous templates, use of expensive paid servers to launch the attack and similarity with Russian hackers trends of using Telegram and sharing Russian hackers socials like Killnet point to a Kremlin connection.
Posts by the group are said to be in Russian and English as opposed to Arabic even though it claims to fight out of Africa on behalf of Muslims worldwide and the official anonymous group has rejected association with Anonymous Sudan.
“While Anonymous collective is a diverse and sprawling group that includes many different agendas observations suggest that the group claiming to be Anonymous Sudan has nothing to do with the greater Anonymous collective or the users behind the original Anonymous Sudan or #OpSudan,” Cyber security experts Truesec said.
“They appear instead to belong to the ecosystem of Russian hacktivist collective that includes KillNet and other groups some of which are reported to have ties to the Russian intelligence and security services,” the cyber security brief reads.
President Ruto has shifted Kenya’s foreign policy to the West visiting America and even hosting the American first lady and top trade officials as Kenya prepares to seal a trade pact with the US.
On the other hand Nairobi has skipped the Russia-Africa summit this week at a time that coincides with the recent attack.
