Kenyan government websites are currently offline and will stay inaccessible until September 10, 2014. The tens of sites are currently undergoing security upgrade.
According to Victor Kiyalo, the ICT Authority’s acting CEO, the move is to ensure that the websites run at acceptable security standards.
It is also claimed that the move could been triggered by the spate of hacking on government websites in July.
According to Kiyalo, “the ICT Authority has formulated comprehensive standards to protect public web content, security, appearance and accessibility of public websites. For the standards to be enforced, we carried out an audit of government websites. The audit disclosed that in their current state, several of the websites are not safe and do not conform to the standards.”
Kiyalo noted that the period would also facilitate training of public communication and ICT officers on ‘best practices’ for maintaining and developing websites.