Kenya’s official presidential website, president.go.ke, is back online after hackers defaced its homepage and demanded a ransom of five Bitcoin, worth approximately KSh41.3 million (about $320,000), in an attack detected on 18 July 2026.
The attackers replaced the site’s homepage with messages targeting President William Ruto directly, alongside a cryptocurrency wallet address, and threatened to leak unspecified information about the president if payment was not made by 6pm the same day.
The defaced page read in part: “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.”
State House confirmed the breach and said its ICT team, working alongside the National Kenya Computer Incident Response Team Coordination Centre, restricted access to the website shortly after the defacement was discovered to contain the incident.
Cabinet Secretary for Information, Communications and the digital Economy William Kabogo Gitau confirmed that incident response protocols had been activated and said there was no evidence that sensitive government data had been accessed, exfiltrated or lost.
Kabogo also posted on X that: “the responsible Agencies that protect websites are on top of stuff.”
No hacker group has publicly claimed responsibility for the attack, and the government has not attributed it to any specific individual or organisation.
Officials have not disclosed whether the intrusion extended beyond the homepage into back-end government systems or how the attackers gained access.
This is the second breach to hit president.go.ke within a year. In November 2025, a coordinated attack briefly compromised several government websites, including those of the ministries of Interior, Health, Education, Labour and Energy, alongside the presidency portal.
Those platforms were restored after the government activated emergency cyber response procedures, and investigations were opened under the Computer Misuse and Cybercrimes Act.
The latest incident follows a report released in June 2026 by the National Computer and Cybercrime Coordination Committee, which recorded more than three billion cyber attacks targeting Kenyan government systems, cloud infrastructure and critical digital services over a three-month period, with Nairobi logging the highest number of cybercrime cases nationally.
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