The National Kenya Computer Incident Response Team Coordination Centre (National KE-CIRT/CC) detected 11,124,632,684 cyber threat events between July 2025 and June 2026.
That is 29 per cent more than the 8.62 billion events of the previous year, according to the Communications Authority of Kenya’s (CA) fourth quarter sector statistics report.
Safaricom cited the figure on 14 October 2026, when it convened leaders from government, business and the security industry for its fourth Cybersecurity Summit in Nairobi. The theme was “Harnessing AI, Strengthening Security.”
Where the events came from
System vulnerabilities account for 10.6 billion of the events, about 95 per cent of the total, up 28.2 per cent year on year. Smaller categories grew faster.
| Threat type | 2025/26 total | Change on 2024/25 |
|---|---|---|
| System vulnerabilities | 10.6 billion | Up 28.2% |
| Malware | 230.3 million | Up 64.8% |
| Brute force attacks | 132.2 million | Up 3.6% |
| DDoS attacks | 72.2 million | Up 114.3% |
| Web application attacks | 51.5 million | Up 99% |
The centre recorded 3.37 billion events in the January to March quarter and 2.36 billion in April to June, a drop of 30 per cent. DDoS attacks, which flood a service with traffic until it fails, fell 90 per cent between the two quarters, from 8.2 million to 819,325. The year’s total came mostly from earlier months.
The CA’s January to March report attributed the detections to inadequate system patching, low awareness of phishing and the growing use of AI and machine learning by attackers. Director General David Mugonyi wrote in that report that cybersecurity is “a shared responsibility.”
What added
Safaricom Group Chief Risk Officer Nicholas Mulila told the summit that the Communications Authority recorded about 69 million malware attempts across Kenyan networks in the first quarter of this year. The CA report puts the figure at 68,726,238. Mulila said that count reflects only what systems detect. “It must be much more,” he said.
He warned that attackers may already sit inside company systems. “As we sit here, there could be some guys sitting on our systems, and we don’t know what they are doing,” Mulila said.
Mulila said Safaricom built a deepfake of its own chief executive about a year ago as a test. “It looks very, very real,” he said. Group CEO Peter Ndegwa said a cloned voice of him promoted an offer on M-Pesa. “That was not me,” Ndegwa said.
Khusoko covered last year’s summit, where Safaricom presented its AI fraud prevention tools. Central Bank of Kenya data showed mobile banking fraud rising 344 per cent in 2024, to Sh810.6 million.
Next: What Ndegwa and the John Kabogo Cabinet Secretary committed to.
