Economy

Court orders probe into Safaricom system hack claim

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Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore. FILE PHOTO | SALATON NJAU | NMG

A court has directed the Divisional Crime Investigating Office (DCIO) to probe claims that mobile phone provider Safaricom’s #ticker:SCOM system was hacked into, resulting in a technical hitch, the directions were made yesterday in the trial of two Nigerians.

One of the accused, Mr Mohammed Sali, has alleged that he was among those responsible for the collapse of the system.

Yesterday, Chief Magistrate Francis Andayi directed that the court papers filed by Mr Sali on how the act was conducted be forwarded to the DCIO for investigations and that recommendations be reported to the court during the next hearing.

Safaricom suffered an outage on April 24, which left its 27.7 million subscribers out of reach and without access to mobile financial services.

The Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) is yet to make public the report on the outage which knocked out services for several hours.

READ: Spectre of hacking looms large over firms

The report was to indicate if Safaricom was to be fined. Outages caused by factors beyond the control of an operator, technically known as force majeure, do not attract sanctions.

“I have gone through the documents but they do not relate to the case before court and so I direct that the same be forwarded to the DCIO for investigations. The recommendations made should be filed in this court,” Mr Andayi said.

The court also allowed a request made by Mr Sahi, through his lawyer Steve Kimathi, that the contents of the documents be kept away from the public to protect the identity of people he has adversely mentioned.

Mr Sahi, who was last year charged alongside Mr Ousman Ibrahim Bako, claimed that he is aware of the events leading to the collapse of Safaricom’s systems, adding that they siphoned Sh2.5 million which was shared with police officers.

The matter will be presented before the DCIO on May 29. Mr Sahi sensationally claimed that he accessed Safaricom systems from his Industrial Area cell.

The foreigners were charged in March, 2016, with obtaining money by false pretence, forgery, being in possession of instruments for making fake money, failing to register as foreign nationals and engaging in employment without authorisation.

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