Cyber criminals hit harder with identical websites of top firms

Last week, the Kenya Police website landed in the hands of cyber criminals, who defaced the front page with a message dedicating their feat to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO and founder.

The hacker also updated the title of the page, raising the question about the safety of data held by government at a time its agencies are adopting e-government.

Others whose websites have been hacked include State House, Ministry of Finance, administration police and mobile service provider, Yu among others.

Technology experts say that companies with websites should not just stop at protecting their sites from external attacks, but also monitor created identical websites to their own, doubling their workload.

“Most of such websites contain just one or two web pages with the specific misinformation. It can even be a creation of competitors with an intention to ruin your reputation as a company,” said Colin Azavedo, director of a marketing agency Wunderman.

According to Mr Azavedo, large companies that witness lots of hits per day on their websites are the most targeted and it is important that they invest in personnel to monitor what is happening within and outside their websites.

“This will call for more investment in human resource with a specific job description of monitoring what is happening on their websites and also the fraudsters. They can also use e-mail, instant messaging, or social networks to direct users to enter details at a fake website whose look and feel are almost identical to the legitimate one,” said Mr Azavedo.

Organisations that also rarely update their websites have also been cited as potential targets.

“If you rarely update your website or check it out frequently, an online criminal could easily make a copy and use it against you,” said Mr Simiyu.

Threaten credibility

The rising cases of online insecurity now threaten the credibility of information on company’s websites, and could hurt the ongoing shift towards e-collaboration, brand building and marketing.

Social websites have been the easiest targets of cons since they can easily open a new account for their target company at little or no expense and share information as if it is coming from the said company to its group of friends or followers.

Some of the main areas Kenyans engage companies online that can easily be used by cons include promotions or specific offer about the brand or use specific applications promoted by the brand.

Should this information be false or from a fraudster’s website, then this would work against the company’s image.