Kenya Investigates President William Ruto Website Breach as Hackers Demand 5 Bitcoin

Government Response Triggered

Kenya’s authorities is investigating a cybersecurity breach that concisely disabled the authoritative website of President William Ruto connected July 18, with attackers defacing the homepage and demanding a bitcoin ransom.

According to a report, the website, president.go.ke, was taken offline aft hackers replaced its modular contented with derogatory messages directed astatine Ruto. The attackers demanded 5 bitcoins and threatened to leak unspecified accusation if the ransom was not paid by Saturday evening.

William Kabogo, the furniture caput for the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Digital Economy, confirmed that the government’s ICT Authority instantly activated cybersecurity effect protocols. Authorities temporarily restricted nationalist entree to the portal to incorporate the contented and let for a forensic investigation.

“At this time, determination is nary grounds of unauthorized entree to delicate data, information exfiltration, oregon nonaccomplishment of information,” Kabogo said successful a statement posted connected the societal media level X. “Government systems and integer services stay unafraid and operational.”

State House officials confirmed their method teams were moving alongside the National Computer and Cybercrime Coordination Committee (NC4) and extracurricular method partners to reconstruct the leafage and find however the information perimeter was breached.

This incidental marks the 2nd high-profile cyberattack connected Kenyan authorities infrastructure wrong a year. In November 2025, a coordinated onslaught concisely compromised respective ministry websites, sparking heightened scrutiny implicit the resilience of the East African nation’s expanding integer nationalist services.

A caller NC4 study noted that Kenya’s captious infrastructure and authorities systems faced billions of cyber threats implicit 3 months earlier this year, prompting ongoing efforts to standardize cybercrime investigations nationwide. At the clip of penning (July 18, 1.51 p.m. EST), the website was inactive down.