Mucheru defends govt over IEBC hacking claims » Capital News
NAIVASHA, Kenya, Jun 11 – Information Communication and Technology (ICT) Cabinet Secretary Joe Mucheru has rubbished claims that the Government was planning to hack the Independent Electoral Boundaries Commission (IEBC) Information technology system in order to rig the forthcoming General Elections in favour of one presidential candidate.
Mucheru said IEBC was an independent body that is procuring its own Information Technology (IT) systems for the upcoming elections and the ministry was not involved in any way in this process.
“We do not have any plans or intension to hack the IEBC servers neither do we have the know-how to do it because the servers are procured and secured by the IEBC itself,” Mucheru said.
He said the allegations coming from one section of the political divide were pure political rhetoric saying it is not possible to hack the system secured by IEBC itself without prior knowledge or information about its security.
The CS was speaking in Naivasha on Friday when he officially closed the Cyber Security Strategy 2022 – 2026 workshop which he said will give guidelines that will help the government strengthen the cyber security laws.
On network coverage in the country during the coming elections, the CS assured the country that the entire country will be covered for the ease of transmission of the election results as IEBC had procured 1,500 satellite modems to be used in the areas not covered by the 3G network.
The country goes to polls on August 9 with over 20million registered voters expected to elect their leaders at six levels- presidential, gubernatorial, senatorial, county women representatives, member of parliament and member of county assemblies.
Mucheru said Kenya has the highest international bandwidth per internet user with 566.41kilobites per second and a compounded annual growth rate of 52 percent making it one of the most digitalized countries in the world.
He said every sector and industry and the government at large had adopted and relied heavily on ICTs and the internet as economic and governance resources and hence the need to secure our digital space.
The CS said to this…
