Why Hackers in Kenya Attack are Being Linked to Russia

Organizations have been rethinking their security structures following a series of cyber-attacks that posed a threat to Kenya's economy.

As technology continues to rapidly evolve, cyber-attacks are becoming more frequent and complicated. Advances such as nanotechnology and blockchain are anticipated to further complicate and intensify cyberwarfare. Recent cyber-attacks in Kenya have sparked heightened concern about identifying the threat actors known as Anonymous Sudanhackers. Sources identify the hackers as part of a politically motivated group of hackers from Sudan who have been conducting DDoS attacks against multiple organizations. Anonymous Sudan has claimed to be a part of the Russian threat actor group Killnet and has actively participated in their attacks.

A report by Flashpoint suggests that Anonymous Sudan which claims to be a group of Sudanese hacktivists with Islamic motivations may actually be a Russian state-sponsored group using social media to disguise their true identity. The group uses distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that bombard servers with internet traffic, making online services and websites unavailable. Anonymous Sudan reportedly uses a collection of 61 servers in Germany to create enough traffic to pull off their attacks. Recently, the Kenyan government's eCitizen portal was the target of one of their attacks, but no personal information was accessed or lost.

Anonymous Sudan is a group of hackers that has been involved in multiple raids on organizations in various countries around the world including Sweden, India, the USA, Denmark, Israel, Kenya, and Nigeria. They use a botnet to flood targeted websites with traffic, making them inaccessible to users. Anonymous Sudan also leverages cloud server infrastructure and free proxy infrastructures to mask the source of their attacks and disguise their identity. To safeguard against such attacks, industry experts advise implementing Anti-DDoS configurations and ensuring websites are constantly monitored and kept up-to-date with the latest security patches to minimize the chances of vulnerability. Popular hashtags associated with the group include #AnonymousSudan, #Infinity Hackers Group, #KILLNET, #ANONYMOUS RUSSIA, #OpSweden, and #OpSudan.