Kenya Commercial Bank Gets Hacked?

So, Episode 80 of the African Tech Round-up, aka the episode that nearly never happened, is finally out.

In an interview I just taped for the upcoming season of the African Tech Conversations series, Co-founder and Chief Credit Officer of M-KOPA Solar, Chad Larson, shared words he lives by that epitomise why I’m glad the team and I didn’t give up on publishing the podcast this week— despite the ridiculousness that made it nearly impossible to do so. “Done is always better than perfect,” he said. So, here it is.

There’s no doubt that this has so far been a bumper year for the world’s hacking community. Last week, one of Kenya’s biggest banks, the Kenya Commercial Bank (KCB), spent a fair amount of energy trying to convince its customers that their personal data remains uncompromised– this, following claims by a certain programmer who goes by @IrakChris on Twitter claiming to have accessed KCB’s client data through vulnerabilities found in the bank’s mobile app.

Meanwhile, Twitter, Spotify, Amazon, Reddit, Yelp, Netflix, and The New York Times suffered easily one of the world’s biggest coordinated distributed denial of service (aka DDoS) attacks last Friday which led to the sites either slowing to a snail’s pace or being knocked out altogether.

For all the details on these stories and more, tuck into this week’s show, and be sure to tell us what you make of the week’s headlines on Twitter, or via email.

 

Rwanda Launches World’s First Drone Delivery Service

Rwanda has helped Africa beat the rest of the world to rolling out a commercial drone delivery service.

The land of a thousand hills has partnered with the UPS Foundation, Gavi, and the Californian drone startup, Zipline, to start using drones to deliver life-saving medical supplies to hard-to-reach places in the country.

Zipline’s autonomous drones will now fly blood and plasma to places where poor road conditions often result in delays to time-critical deliveries of medical supplies for hours or even days. With drones, delivery time is reduced to minutes, even in bad weather. Take that, Amazon!

Also in this week’s African Tech Round-up is high-profile tech investment news involving Naspers, MTN, as well as William Kirsh-led Triptech Media’s 20% acquisition of the social transit application GoMetro— a startup which seems to be generating a fair amount of investor interest at the moment.

First published in AfricanTechRoundup.com.