Kenyan businesses on hackers' radar

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The report launched on October 28, shows the hacked devices were those that remained configured with their factory default settings and most of them remain vulnerable to remote attacks.

The devices were mainly attacked by hackers from the United States, China, Russia and Venezuela. "We found that in all organisations, malicious traffic reached the end-user computers and was able to bypass the current network security solutions altogether," the report notes.

The report was done by cyber security consulting firm Serianu in partnership with PKF Consulting and United States International University Africa. It was prepared based on data collected from a survey of 275 organisations in Kenya. The report notes that a typical Kenyan business generates thousands of security incidents in a day, with the most active businesses generating around 10,000 security incidents per day.

"We have also discovered that organisations were averaging two infected infrastructure host (servers), 15 infected end user computers and 30 unauthorised remote connections per day."

The report notes that the only way to determine if an organisation has been compromised is to correlate logged activities, which takes too much time.

"Organisations should investigate whether their protection mechanisms are sufficient in today's interconnected world where attacks are growing in complexity," it notes. William Makatiani, Serianu managing director, said Kenyan businesses will lose approximately Ksh10 billion in 2015 due to the increased hacking incidents.

He advised businesses to change the factory default settings and administrative passwords in their devices to avoid giving hackers an easy time getting in. "We noted that most of these devices have their administrative interfaces viewable from anywhere on the internet since their owners have failed to change the manufacturer's default settings," he said during the launch of the report in Nairobi.

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